GIFT   OF 

<X.     VW^x^i 


JESUS 


AND  THE 


CHRISTIAN  RELIGION 


BY 
FRANCIS  A.  HENRY 


"  Our  Lord  Jesus  called  himself  Truth 
and  not  Habit:  Whatever  is  taught 
contrary  to  truth  is  heresy,  be  it 
never  so  old  a  habit." — TERTULLIAN. 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 
NEW  YORK  AND   LONDON 

TTbc  fmicfeerbocfcer  press 

1916 


COPYRIGHT,  1916 

BY 
FRANCIS  A.  HENRY 


ftnichecbocher  pre0», 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I. — THE  GOSPEL  .                  i 

II. — MESSIANISM    ...         .         .         .         .65 

III.— PAULINISM      .         .         .                 .         .  97 

*  IV. — CATHOLICISM  .         .  '      .         .         .         .         .  145 

1.  THE  PERPETUATION  OF  JUDAISM.        .         .  145 

2.  THE  ANTECEDENTS  OF  THE  SACRAMENTS      .  178 

3.  CREED  AND  DOGMA   .....  237 

4.  THE  CANON •  259 

5.  THE  CHURCH    .         .         .         .                  '.  292 

a.  THE  PAULINE  CHURCHES        .         .         .  292 

b.  THE  CHURCH  OF  THE  PASTORALS    .         .314 

c.  THE  RISE  OF  THE  HIERARCHY        .         .  332 

6.  CHRISTOLOGY — DUALISM  IN  THOUGHT.         .  368 

7.  ASCETICISM — DUALISM  IN  LIFE  .         .         .  385 

8.  THE  CHURCH  AS  MEDIATOR      . .         .         .  397 

9.  AUTHORITY 411 

V. — CONCLUSION    .         ...         .         .         .  426 


Jesus   and   the    Christian 
Religion 


THe  Gospel 

IN  the  world  of  today,  in  this  time  of  swift  movement  and 
ceaseless  change,  many  religious  doctrines  that  have 
been  handed  down  to  us  from  former  ages  are  coming  to 
appear  antiquated  and  outworn,  and  many  traditional 
beliefs  are  losing  their  hold  upon  the  minds  of  men. 
Certain  articles  of  the  ancient  creed  are  called  in  question ; 
some  men  are  for  rejecting  them  altogether  and  others 
claim  to  interpret  them  in  a  new  sense  without  regard  to 
what  lay  in  the  minds  of  their  framers.  In  "religious 
circles"  the  relations  between  innovators  and  conserva- 
tives are  daily  becoming  more  strained  and  the  air  is 
filled  with  agitation  and  the  strife  of  tongues.  At  such  a 
time  it  would  seem  that  we  cannot  do  better  than  to  turn 
from  disputation  and  go  back  to  the  fountain-head  of 
Christianity,  the  life  and  teaching  of  Him  we  call  our  Lord 
and  Master;  to  try  to  enter  into  His  mind  and  gain  an 
insight  of  the  religion  He  believed  in  and  lived  by.  The 
following  pages  are  an  attempt  to  bring  before  the 


•  If*  *  .  «T»I         r*  i 

2  The  Gospel 

;5;;<i?"f::^      •' 

reader  some  of  the  leading  principles  of  that  religion  with 
the  purpose  and  the  hope  of  inducing  him  to  make  a 
thorough  study  of  a  subject  until  recently  too  much 
neglected — "the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus,"  and  not  as  it  is 
in  the  churches  or  in  the  Letter-writers  of  the  New 
Testament. 

Jesus  was  brought  up  to  the  carpenters'  trade  in  a 
pious  family  of  Nazareth,  a  country  town  of  Lower  Galilee, 
until  at  about  the  age  of  thirty,  as  it  is  said,  he  came  before 
the  people  with  a  stock  of  profoundly  original  ideas,  the 
seed  of  a  religious  revolution.  The  gospels  tell  us  almost 
nothing  of  his  life  and  circumstances  during  the  interven- 
ing years,  but  their  unwritten  history  is  that  of  his  mental 
and  spiritual  growth  and  change,  the  development  within 
his  soul  of  the  new  religion  he  was  to  give  the  world. 
From  the  man  as  we  find  him  we  may  learn  something  of 
his  boyhood  and  youth.  To  all  the  influences  of  the  world 
about  him,  all  shapes  that  life  could  show,  his  young  soul 
must  have  opened  with  that  eager  receptivity  which 
belongs  to  the  temperament  of  genius,  taking  in  from  the 
whole  range  of  its  environment  ever  new  experiences  to 
nurture  its  growth.  His  love  of  nature,  in  his  eyes  radiant 
with  the  immanence  of  God,  would  lead  him  to  the  scenes 
of  varied  beauty  surrounding  his  home,  and  his  genial 
sympathies  to  the  haunts  of  men  and  the  free  and  natural 
life  of  Galilee.1  Meantime  the  current  of  his  inner  life 
ran  full.  We  find  Jesus  entering  on  his  career  equipped 
with  a  fulness  of  experience  and  a  maturity  of  thought 

1  In  his  Vie  de  JSsus  Renan  draws  an  attractive  picture  of  Nazareth,  its 
white  houses  climbing  the  slope  covered  with  the  fig  tree  and  the  olive,  and 
their  gardens  rich  with  flowers;  and  he  adds:  "  Les  environs,  d'ailleurs,  sont 
charmants,  et  mil  endroit  du  monde  ne  fut  si  bien  fait  pour  les  reves  de 
1'absolu  bonheur."  Some  hundred  feet  above  the  village  the  heights  com- 
mand a  magnificent  panorama  of  mountain,  plain  and  distant  sea,  "a  map 
of  Old  Testament  history,"  which  travelers  have  described  in  glowing 
terms. 


The  Gospel  3 

acquired  in  his  earlier  years,  when  now  he  mingled  freely 
with  the  world,  and  now  withdrew  from  its  thronging 
impressions  and  importunate  activities  to  that  solitude  of 
self-communion  which  every  man  requires  if  he  is  to 
maintain  a  fixed  and  centred  personality.  For  the  religious 
man  this  resting  of  the  self  is  a  rest  in  God;  and  if  Jesus 
was  a  Galilean  in  his  fresh  and  vivid  feeling  for  the  spec- 
tacle of  nature  and  the  pageantry  of  life,  he  was  an  Israelite 
of  the  highest  type  in  the  depth  and  reality  of  his  life  in 
God.  And  he  so  lived  in  the  world  without  him  and  the 
world  within  as  to  bring  these  into  harmony,  The  mani- 
fold experiences  of  common  life,  and  converse  with  men  in 
the  sober  light  of  day,  kept  his  heavenward  aspirations 
and  his  musing  introspections  from  becoming  overwrought 
and  morbid,  while  his  profound  religiousness,  his  sense  of 
intimate  communion  with  the  All-Father,  deepened  his 
view  of  the  outward  world  and  lent  a  consecration  to  every 
aspect  of  its  life. 

It  seems  evident  in  the  light  of  his  later  teaching  that 
from  early  youth  Jesus  lived,  silently  and  unmarked  by 
those  around  him,  an  intense  religious  life,  filled  with 
aspirations  toward  perfection  and  the  sense  of  an  ever 
closer  communion  with  God;  while  from  his  meditations 
on  the  Law  and  the  Prophets  and  from  the  intuitions  of  his 
own  heart  a  new  ideal  was  gradually  emerging  to  his  view. 
A  deeply  religious  nature  is  apt  to  be  reserved,  and  even  if 
Jesus  had  been  disposed  to  expansiveness  no  one  of  his 
family  or  friends  would  have  understood  him.  When  he 
came  preaching  to  Nazareth  he  found  no  hearing  from  his 
fellow-townsmen,  who  after  the  manner  of  the  vulgar  took 
offence  at  the  superiority  of  one  who  had  gone  forth  from 
among  themselves;  and,  what  must  have  been  more  de- 
pressing, he  met  with  no  sympathy  from  his  mother  and 
brothers  (Mark  vi,  1-4)  who  now  followed  him  to  Caper- 
naum, or  had  already  gone  thither,  to  put  him  under 


4  The  Gospel 

restraint  on  account  of  his  unfortunate  insanity:  "to  lay 
hold  on  him,  for,  they  said,  he  is  beside  himself."1  It  is 
plain  from  this  later  experience  that  from  the  first  his 
original  conceptions,  the  daring  flights  of  his  religious 
genius,  would  have  appeared  to  the  home  circle  dangerous 
extravagances  subversive  of  their  placid  orthodoxy.  And 
indeed  with  this  Jesus  was  getting  out  of  touch.  His 
early  reverence  for  the  Scribes  and  all  their  heavy  learning 
was  waning  fast  as  he  came  to  see  that  the  rules  of  conduct 
imposed  by  the  tradition  of  the  Schools  were  often  far 
from  accordant  with  the  spirit  of  the  Law,  while  the  cut 
and  dried  piety  of  outward  observance,  the  chief  interest 
of  these  Masters  in  Israel,  and  the  punctilious  pedantry 
that  spent  itself  on  petty  details  of  religious  practice  must 
have  seemed  pitiful  in  contrast  with  the  simple,  noble 
religion  of  the  old  prophets.  In  religion  as  in  all  things 
Jesus  was  a  lover  of  simplicity.  A  few  great  principles  he 
found  alone  essential  and  sufficient :  a  fervent  faith  in  God, 
a  vigorous  striving  for  righteousness,  a  loving  helpfulness 
to  men.  A  certain  sense  for  inwardness  and  reality,  such 
as  made  the  strength  of  Puritanism,  rendered  him  careless 
of  external  forms,  and  all  that  was  mere  surface  and 
appearance  roused  his  instinctive  aversion.  Prayer,  for 
instance,  was  the  very  breath  of  his  spiritual  life,  but  this 
sublime  dialogue  between  the  human  soul  and  the  Eternal 
demanded  the  privacy  of  solitude.  To  repeat  prescribed 
formulas  at  the  street  corners  seemed  to  him  "acting" 
(hypocrisy)  a  parody  and  profanation  of  the  highest 
privilege  of  humanity. 

How  he  lived  in  the  old  Scripture,  his  mind  and  memory 
steeped  in  its  history,  prophecy,  and  poetry,  lies  on  the 
surface  of  his  story,  and  we  see  how  detailed  and  thorough 
was  his  knowledge  when  we  find  him  holding  his  own  in 

1  Mark  iii,  21  and  31,  32.  The  section  22-30  is  misplaced  and  should 
follow  vii,  23. 


The  Gospel  5 

frequent  disputations  with  the  Scribes  whose  life  work  was 
the  study  of  God's  Word.  Yet  Jesus  dealt  freely  with 
the  noble  literature  of  his  race.  Accepting  as  a  whole  the 
tradition  of  the  past,  he  let  it  run  as  it  were  through  the 
filter  of  his  consciousness,  clarifying  from  all  alien  elements 
its  eternal  truth.  The  high  morality  of  the  Wisdom- 
books,  the  profoundly  spiritual  intuitions  of  the  Prophets, 
the  Psalms  with  their  vibrant  note  of  personal  religion, 
their  outpourings  of  the  soul,  appealed  to  him  intensely; 
there  was  much  else  that  left  him  quite  indifferent.  It 
was  the  criticism  of  the  heart;  almost  unconsciously  he 
brought  all  things  to  the  test  of  his  religious  intuition,  an 
inward  light  of  calm  deep  certitude,  putting  aside  as  if  it 
had  not  been  written  whatever  was  incongruous  with  his 
own  idea  of  God,  and  by  a  sort  of  spontaneous  selection 
finding  only  in  the  sacred  writings  what  would  nourish  his 
own  lofty  and  delicate  soul.  Such  elements  he  would 
preserve  and  build  upon  as  not  out  of  harmony  with  other 
truths  he  had  come  to  apprehend.  As  he  said  afterward : 
"Every  scribe  instructed  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is 
like  a  householder  who  bringeth  out  of  his  treasure  things 
old  and  new."  For  it  was  not  by  rejecting  wholesale  the 
religion  of  his  people,  but  rather  by  reforming  it  or  trans- 
forming it  in  his  own  mind  that  he  came  one  day  to  see 
how  far  he  had  departed  from  what  was  "said  by  them  of 
old  time. ' '  And  by  this  way  of  purification  and  simplifica- 
tion he  was  led  on  into  the  heart  and  essence  of  the  divine 
revelation  enshrined  in  the  pages  of  the  old  record. 

Nor  was  it  only  the  written  word  that  brought  this 
revelation;  he  found  it  also  in  the  book  of  nature  and  of 
life,  and  manifold  messages  of  joy  and  love  and  trust  came 
to  him  from  the  beauty  of  the  Father's  world.  When 
after  the  Exile  Jewish  thought  began  to  outgrow  the 
anthropomorphism  of  earlier  days  it  lost  something  of  the 
truth  wrapped  in  that  illusion.  More  and  more  it  took 


6  The  Gospel 

a  deistic  trend  that  brought  it  to  the  worship  of  a  divine 
absentee  who  had  retired  from  the  world.  For  Jesus  He 
was  the  Living  God  of  Israel's  simple  faith,  a  God  im- 
manent and  ever  active  in  the  orderly  course  of  nature. 
He  did  not  set  out  with  an  a  priori  theory  of  the  divine 
government  of  the  world,  but  rather  sought  to  find  out 
by  observation  what  was  in  reality  the  method  of  that 
government,  and  so  he  learned  to  read  God's  mind  in 
nature's  ways  of  working — wide,  gradual,  uniform  and 
sure.  No  teacher  of  spiritual  truth  ever  drew  more 
inspiration  from  the  silent  voices  of  the  natural  world. 
The  old  belief  of  Israel  was  still  prevalent  among  the  pious 
that  a  man's  worldly  prosperity  was  a  good  conduct  prize; 
but  when  the  harvest  was  ripening  in  the  sun,  or  when  the 
parched  earth  was  drinking  in  the  fertilizing  rain,  Jesus 
noted  that  the  heavenly  Benefactor  made  no  difference 
between  the  fields  of  the  good  and  of  the  evil,  revealing  a 
magnanimity  of  impartial  love  infinitely  surpassing  men's 
petty  notions  of  divine  justice,  and  teaching  by  this 
example  that  we  too  ought  to  do  good  to  those  who  hate 
us.  Again,  he  saw  the  poor  about  him  harassed  with  care 
for  the  wherewithal  to  provide  the  necessaries  of  life,  and 
this  seemed  to  him  a  heathenish  temper  of  mind.  But  if 
the  people  had  forgotten  God,  He  had  not  left  Himself 
without  witness  to  His  remembrance  of  them  in  the  birds 
of  the  air  and  the  lilies  of  the  field  fed  and  clothed  by  His 
providence,  shaming  the  faithless  anxieties  of  men.  The 
lower  creatures  neither  sow  nor  reap;  they  toil  not,  for 
they  cannot  toil.  Man  who  has  this  added  power  to 
work  and  earn  may  well  trust  his  Father — not  theirs — 
who  cares  for  the  helpless  birds.  A  mind  open  to  the 
teaching  of  such  analogies  could  find  "tongues  in  the 
trees,  books  in  the  running  brooks,  sermons  in  stones,  and 
good  in  everything."  The  least  things  that  fell  under  his 
close  and  keen  observation  came  to  Jesus  charged  with 


The  Gospel  7 

suggestiveness;  objects  and  incidents  the  simplest  and 
most  familiar  spoke  to  him  of  God  and  lent  their  aid  to 
his  picturing  of  the  Father's  love.  As  he  walked  through 
the  country  or  the  streets  of  towns  nothing  of  human 
interest  escaped  his  kindly  penetrating  eye.  He  passes 
the  provision  stall  and  when  afterward  he  would  speak  of 
God's  protecting  care  remembers  to  say:  "Are  not  two 
sparrows  sold  for  a  farthing  ?"  He  sees  a  woman  sweeping 
her  house  for  a  lost  coin  and  links  that  sight  with  God's 
eager  seeking  of  the  sinner.  The  homely  incident  of  old 
skins  bursting  with  the  fermentation  of  new  wine  he  will 
recall  to  teach  that  new  truth  breaks  through  fixed  tradi- 
tional forms,  and  the  motherly  hen  gathering  her  brood 
safely  under  her  wings  he  will  take  for  an  image  of  God's 
yearning  to  draw  His  rebellious  people  to  Himself.  And 
so  the  sheep  following  the  shepherd,  yet  one  or  another 
going  astray  and  roaming  in  the  wild,  the  sower  scattering 
his  seed,  the  fisherman  drawing  his  net,  the  man  at  the 
plow  who  must  keep  his  eyes  on  his  work,  women 
leavening  bread,  children  playing  in  the  market-place, 
laborers  waiting  there  for  hire — all  gave  him  material  for 
his  immortal  stories  and  became  the  vehicle  of  a  teaching 
the  simplest  and  profoundest  that  the  world  has  known. 

But  deeper  and  fuller  than  the  revelation  in  Scripture 
or  in  Nature  was  that  which  spoke  from  his  own  inward 
experience.  The  pure  depths  of  his  religious  consciousness 
revealed  to  him  the  greatest  of  all  spiritual  truths  that 
man  is  the  child  of  God.  His  true  relation  to  the  Infinite 
and  Perfect  One  is  not  that  of  a  subject  to  his  monarch, 
nor  of  a  sinner  to  his  judge,  but  the  relation  of  a  son  to  his 
father.1  God  our  Father!  In  the  conviction  and  the 

1  "  De  ce  qu'il  sentait  Dieu  dans  son  cceur  comme  un  Pere,  de  ce  qu'il  ne 
pouvait  le  concevoir  autrement,  de  ce  que  son  coeur,  profonde"ment  relig- 
ieux,  avait  saisi  par  une  intuition  immediate  que  tel  e"tait  n  effet  le  vrai 
rapport  de  Dieu  avec  lui,  la  consequence  implicite  e"tait  que  ce  rapport 


8  The  Gospel 

sentiment  those  words  imply  in  one  who  speaks  them,  in 
the  truth  they  express,  seen  with  a  breadth  and  realised 
with  an  intensity  which  made  the  experience  of  Jesus  a 
vitalising  power  for  his  followers,  lay  the  heart  of  his 
religion,  the  root  principle  of  the  deep  new  life  he  brought 
into  the  world.  His  soul  was  illumined  by  the  conscious- 
ness intensely  clear  and  certain,  which  no  sorest  trial  could 
ever  cloud  or  trouble,  of  his  living  union  with  God  in  the 
constant  interchange  of  love,  and  his  life  was  filled  with 
the  life  of  God  as  the  atmosphere  is  filled  with  sunlight. 
This  is  religion  in  its  purity  and  truth ;  this  is  that  knowl- 
edge of  God  which  is  eternal  life.  And  so  this  religion,  or 
this  life,  is  not  a  special  kind  of  life,  or  a  special  sphere, 
but  everyday  life  lived  on  a  higher  plane,  the  taking  up  of 
human  life  into  its  truth.  The  East  has  been  the  birth- 
place of  a  mysticism  in  which  the  God-consciousness 
overwhelms  and  absorbs  the  consciousness  of  self.  Such 
Pantheism  knows  nothing  of  the  nature  of  spirit,  human  or 
divine.  God  in  him  and  he  in  God  was  the  source  and 
strength  of  Jesus'  personality,  and  the  more  completely 
he  was  God-possessed  the  more  he  was  himself.  With  his 
soul  given  to  religion  and  bent  on  bringing  men  to  God, 
we  find  no  touch  of  the  ecstatic  in  his  message.  His  out- 
look on  the  world  is  sane,  calm,  clear-eyed,  and  nothing 
has  power  to  disturb  his  inner  freedom  and  serenity  of 
soul.1  And  so  his  self -surrender  to  the  Father  was  no 

devait  exister  de  m&ne  entre  Dieu  et  les  autres  hommes;  si  du  moins  il 
n'existait  pas  en  fait,  il  existait  en  droit."  A.  Re"ville,  L'Enseignement 
de  Jesus  Christ,  20. 

'Arnold  has  called  attention  to  the  "sweet  reasonableness"  of  Jesus, 
and  it  is  this  that  maintained  the  balance  and  harmony  of  his  nature.  "  It 
is  owing  to  the  all-pervading  presence  of  this  subtle  virtue  that  in  Christ, 
alone  among  men,  we  have  faith  without  dogmatism,  enthusiasm  without 
fanaticism,  strength  without  violence,  idealism  without  visionariness, 
naturalness  without  materialism,  freedom  without  licence,  self-sacrifice 
without  asceticism,  purity  without  austerity,  saintliness  without  morbidity, 


The  Gospel  9 

self-abandonment,  neither  did  it  mean  passivity;  rather  it 
constrained  him  to  action,  summoned  him  to  concentrate 
all  the  energies  of  a  heroic  will  on  striving  upward  to  the 
height  of  God's  design,  to  conquer  and  win  for  himself  a 
manhood  transfigured  into  the  glory  of  God's  likeness. 
Jesus'  own  religion  and  his  religion  for  all  men  is  one  of  the 
loftiest  idealism  in  faith  and  aspiration,  and  yet  entirely 
measured,  rational  and  sober,  for  it  rests  on  facts  of  experi- 
ence and  works  to  a  practical  end. 

The  truth  that  God  is  the  Father  of  men  could  only 
appear  to  a  soul  in  which  the  image  of  God  was  reflected 
unblurred,  because  the  mirror  was  without  blemish.  The 
revelation  to  Jesus,  or  his  discovery,  of  God  as  Father  is 
the  manifestation  and  the  proof  of  his  absolutely  normal 
humanity.  He  could  not  but  see  that  other  men  were 
far  from  sharing  his  own  filial  consciousness,  and  some 
betrayed  by  their  restlessness  and  discontent  of  soul  their 
lack  of  harmony  with  God  and  with  the  higher  self.  As 
he  looked  beneath  the  surface  of  life,  facing  not  fleeing 
from  the  evil  of  the  world,  the  passions  and  the  greed  of 
men,  their  selfishness  and  sin  did  not  escape  his  notice, 
and  yet  did  not  hide  from  him  a  capacity  of  higher  feeling, 
a  native  goodness  of  heart  that  lived  within  them.  In 
spite  of  all  he  found  disordered  and  depraved  in  the  lives 
of  men  he  never  lost  sight  of  the  infinite  worth  and  dignity 
of  the  human  soul,  and  with  the  love  that  hopeth  all  things 
he  believed  that  its  higher  energies  could  free  themselves 
with  the  help  of  God  from  all  that  clogged  and  corrupted 
them  and  come  to  full  activity,  and  thus  it  should  be 
born  anew.  And  he  came  to  feel  that  he  too  could  help 
to  this  renewal  if  he  could  guide  the  people  to  a  simpler  and 
deeper  religion  than  the  formalism  of  the  Scribes.  His 
saying  to  his  Disciples:  "freely  ye  have  received,  freely 

a  light  which  was  too  clear  to  dazzle,  a  fire  which  was  too  intense  to  flame." 
The  Creed  of  Christ,  205. 


io  The  Gospel 

give"  shows  his  feeling  at  this  time  that  in  being  led  to 
know  the  truth  of  life  he  was  entrusted  with  a  message  and 
called  to  a  mission;  and  more  and  more  the  intense  sym- 
pathy of  this  lover  of  mankind  filled  him  with  longing  to 
spread  abroad  the  glad  tidings  of  the  heavenly  Father  and 
men's  filial  relation  to  Him  which  should  lend  their  life  a 
new  motive  power  of  hope  and  trust  and  aspiration. 

The  imprisonment  of  John  was  the  event  that  called 
his  cherished  purpose  into  action,  and  Jesus  went  forth  to 
carry  out  the  work  of  the  stern  prophet  on  new  lines  in  his 
preaching  of  the  Gospel  of  the  Kingdom.  In  these  two 
words  we  have  the  substance  of  his  teaching  and  its  form : 
the  one  is  for  all  ages  a'nd  for  all  mankind,  the  other  was 
the  creation  of  a  particular  time  and  a  peculiar  people. 
The  creation  of  a  time,  I  say,  for  it  is  beyond  the  power  of 
any  individual  to  create  an  original  "form"  for  the  new 
truth  he  would  teach.  The  teacher  himself  is  of  his 
time  and  dependent  upon  the  social  environment.  The 
material  he  works  upon  is  the  whole  complex  of  concep- 
tions, religious,  ethical,  imaginative,  which  forms  the 
common  mental  atmosphere.  He  must  speak  to  his 
contemporaries,  must  use  the  language  they  understand 
and  adopt  for  the  vehicle  of  his  new  ideas,  as  the  condition 
of  their  acceptance,  the  symbols  or  traditions  with  which 
the  people  are  familiar.  In  time  the  new  ideas  will  break 
up  the  imagery  they  began  by  utilising;  the  old  form  will 
become  obsolete  and  the  kernel  shed  the  husk. x 

The  expectation  of  a  "Kingdom  of  God,"  to  be  estab- 

1  "To  express  his  definite  idea  of  a  reign  of  righteousness  on  earth  the 
term  'Kingdom  of  God'  was  used  by  Jesus  by  way  of  accommodation  to  a 
vague  and  indefinite  idea  which  had  grown  up  in  the  course  of  Jewish 
history,  and  it  recommended  itself  to  him  as  a  means  of  indicating  and 
preserving  the  continuity  of  his  teaching  with  the  religious  ideas  current 
among  the  Jews."  Mackintosh,  The  Natural  History  of  the  Christian 
Religion,  158. 


The  Gospel  n 

lished  by  the  fiat  of  almighty  power,  had  long  filled  the 
mind  and  stirred  the  heart  of  the  Jewish  people  when  it 
was  roused  to  a  new  intensity  by  the  Baptist's  declaration 
that  the  kingdom  was  "at  hand."  This  expression,  it 
may  be  noted  here,  is  inexact  and  misleading,  for  what  is 
meant  by  the  Aramaic  original  is  not  a  realm,  a  land  and 
people  subject  to  God,  but  the  reign  or  rule  of  God,  who 
seemed  to  be  withdrawn  into  the  heavens,  effectively 
actualised  in  a  world  hitherto  dominated  by  the  powers  of 
evil.  The  notions  and  fancies  that  gathered  about  this 
Hope  of  Israel  during  successive  generations  were  multi- 
form and  protean;  vague  conceptions  of  various  origin 
and  content  were  current  in  different  circles,  but  never 
were  combined  into  a  definite  system  of  belief.  It  may  be 
said  by  way  of  general  description  that  the  people  were 
looking  for  the  prophetic  "Day  of  Jehovah"  to  usher  in 
the  kingdom :  a  day  of  Battle,  as  many  conceived  it,  when 
the  power  of  the  heathen  should  be  broken  and  the  enemies 
of  Israel  destroyed.  Some  trusted  only  to  the  might  of 
Jehovah  to  bring  the  victory,  others  to  the  advent  of  a 
divinely  appointed  leader,  a  Messiah,  an  anointed  ' '  Son  of 
David,"  endowed  with  special  gifts  and  powers.  There 
were  others  however  who  took  the  Day  of  Jehovah  in 
another  sense;  for  them  it  was  a  day  of  Judgment,  when 
the  nations  should  be  summoned  to  the  bar  of  the  heavenly 
court  and  such  as  would  not  submit  to  the  people  of  God 
given  over  to  the  avenging  angels  and  doomed  to  ever- 
lasting punishment.  After  the  Battle,  or  the  Judgment — 
or  according  to  some  the  judgment  following  the  battle — 
the  kingdom  was  to  be  established  in  a  renovated  Jerusa- 
lem. It  would  be  the  Kingdom  of  God,  for  God  from  the 
beginning  was  Israel's  King,  but  in  one  view  His  rule  was 
to  be  direct  and  personal,  in  another  it  would  be  exercised 
through  His  vicegerent,  the  Messiah.  All  the  earth  would 
be  subject  to  the  saints  of  the  Most  High,  the  pious  child- 


12  The  Gospel 

ren  of  Jacob;  the  dispersed  among  the  Gentiles  would  be 
brought  back  to  the  Holy  Land,  and  the  dead  would  come 
forth  from  the  grave  to  share  with  the  living  in  the  joys 
of  supreme  political  ascendancy  and  boundless  material 
well  being.  The  point  of  chief  moment  is  that  different 
forms  of  the  messianic  hope  tended  to  different  practical 
results.  The  masses,  for  the  most  part,  were  praying  for  a 
warrior  King  to  break  the  yoke  of  Rome  and  bring  to 
Israel  the  world-dominion  predicted  in  the  Apocalypse  of 
Daniel.  Restless  under  pressure  of  poverty  and  social 
injustice,  they  were  inclining  to  the  Zealot  party  that 
urged  a  revolutionary  initiative  to  hasten  the  coming  of 
the  kingdom.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Pharisees  and  the 
well-to-do  classes,  chiefly  interested  in  the  speculations 
of  transcendental  apocalyptic,  were  content  to  wait  in 
patience  for  the  day  when  in  His  good  time  God,  and  not 
man  would  bring  in  the  new  age ;  Judah  was  to  be  delivered, 
it  was  not  to  achieve  deliverance. 

It  was  the  greatness  of  John  the  Baptist  that  in  pro- 
claiming the  coming  of  the  kingdom  he  insisted  upon  a 
moral  regeneration  of  the  people  as  its  necessary  precursor, 
thus  reviving  the  prophetic  ideal  of  righteousness  and  the 
prophetic  protest  against  religious  formalism.  He  called 
on  men  to  repent,  and  to  bring  forth  fruits  of  repentance 
in  good  works,  and  his  endeavor  was  to  found  a  community 
of  those  who  by  repentance  had  qualified  for  membership 
in  the  kingdom.  It  was  the  old  faith  in  the  salvation  of 
a  "remnant."  Baptism,  the  sign  of  repentance,  was  to 
distinguish  the  children  of  the  Kingdom  from  other  Jews 
as  circumcision  distinguished  the  children  of  Abraham 
from  other  peoples.  At  a  time  when  the  sense  of  moral 
obligation  was  so  perverted  and  the  claims  of  social  duty 
so  ignored  by  the  Pharisaic  formalism,  John's  preaching 
came  to  men  with  startling  power;  yet  while  intensely 
earnest  in  its  tone,  it  was  somewhat  narrow  in  its  range 


The  Gospel  13 

and  superficial  in  its  reach.  It  dealt  with  the  outward 
deed,  with  duties  generally  recognised  as  such,  but 
practically  disregarded,  not  with  the  inward  character 
which  governs  the  conduct  of  life.  More  than  all,  it  was 
unfortunate  that  the  preaching  of  moral  amendment  was 
in  great  measure  counteracted  by  his  preaching  of  the 
kingdom.  To  John  as  to  others  the  Kingdom  of  God 
meant  a  visible  theocracy  supernaturally  inaugurated  by 
a  sort  of  divine  coup  d'etat.  This  long-expected  event 
was  now  about  to  come  to  pass;  no  wonder  if  the  thrilling 
announcement  carried  men  away  and  filled  their  rapt 
minds  to  the  exclusion  of  all  else.  Moreover  the  belief 
had  become  prevalent  that  the  coming  kingdom  was  of 
itself  to  establish  the  nation  in  righteousness,  and  this 
would  dispose  the  people  to  continue  their  attitude  of 
passive  expectancy,  untroubled  by  the  call  to  energetic 
moral  action.  That  he  held  to  the  delusive  Hope  of 
Israel  in  all  its  sensuous  features  was  fatal  to  the  work  of 
the  moral  reformer.  Whatever  the  immediate  response 
evoked  by  his  effort  to  uplift  the  people,  it  would  have 
made  no  permanent  impression  had  it  not  been  taken  up 
by  a  greater  than  he. 

It  was  only  with  John's  preaching  of  the  Kingdom  that 
the  message  of  Jesus  could  find  any  link  of  connection  or 
point  of  departure.  He  could  have  little  sympathy  with 
the  extravagant  dreams  of  political  messianism  so  alluring 
to  the  vulgar  mind.  The  satisfaction  of  a  long-nursed 
vindictiveness  and  the  triumph  of  a  narrow  national 
egoism  must  have  seemed  to  him  objects  of  a  hope  that 
was  neither  reasonable  nor  religious.  Nor  could  the 
eschatological  pictures  of  apocalyptic  fancy  any  better 
commend  themselves  to  his  calm  and  sober  intelligence.1 

1  More  than  this,  the  underlying  ideas  from  which  the  Jewish  hope  arose 
were  in  contradiction  with  his  own.  "The  messianic  dream  was  the  out- 
come of  a  struggle  between  Israel's  trust  in  the  promises  of  his  supernatural 


14  The  Gospel 

Yet  his  thoughts  were  not  as  John's  thoughts.  Because 
the  Synoptists  tell  us  that  Jesus  began  his  ministry  with 
an  announcement  identical  in  form  with  that  of  John, 
some  writers — who  will  have  it  that  whatever  differen- 
tiates Christianity  from  Judaism  is  due  to  Paul — infer 
that  the  preaching  of  Jesus  was  little  else  than  a  continua- 
tion of  his  predecessor's.  This  is  to  ignore  Jesus'  estimate 
of  the  Baptist  given  us  in  his  words:  "Among  those  born 
of  women  there  hath  not  arisen  a  greater  than  John  the 
Baptist;  yet  he  that  is  least  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven 
is  greater  than  he."  Before  John  the  Kingdom  was  a 
prophecy;  with  him  for  the  first  time  belief  in  it  became 
practical.  More  than  a  prophet,  in  that  the  prophets 
had  waited  for  Jehovah  to  do  all,  John  proceeded  to  action. 
His  effort  was  to  "prepare  the  way  of  the  Lord"  and  in 
some  measure  to  begin  among  the  people  the  work  that 
Jehovah  would  complete.  But  the  preaching  of  "the 
baptism  of  repentance  for  the  remission  of  sins ' '  disclosed 
its  negative  tendency  in  the  motive  it  urged — escape  from 
the  terrors  of  the  judgment.  It  was  still  the  Judaic  view 
of  the  kingdom  that  possessed  the  Baptist.  Its  entrance 
was  by  the  well-worn  path  of  outward  usages,  and  soon 
the  strong  sweep  of  the  new  religious  movement  was 
falling  into  the  narrow  channel  of  asceticism. 

If  the  expression  "Kingdom  of  God"  was  an  old  one 
both  for  Jesus  and  for  John,  the  idea  which  the  former 

God  and  his  atheistical  distrust  of  Nature.  The  world  as  he  saw  it  was 
bereft  of  God's  presence,  and  except  for  a  miracle,  irredeemably  evil.  But 
sooner  or  later  the  promises  would  be  fulfilled,  the  reign  of  Satan  would  be 
ended  and  the  Kingdom  of  God  would  come  upon  earth.  The  premisses  from 
which  Christ  started  were  the  very  negation  of  those  from  which  Israel  had 
evolved  his  fantastic  hope.  The  world  as  Christ  saw  it  was  under  the  rule, 
not  of  Satan  but  of  God,  and  Nature,  far  from  being  irredeemably  evil,  was 
animated  and  illumined  by  the  Divine  Presence.  To  look  forward  to  the 
coming  of  the  kingdom  of  God  as  to  a  future  event  was  a  waste  of  hope  and 
a  misuse  of  faith.  The  kingdom  was  already  in  our  midst  and  all  that  men 
needed  to  do  was  to  realise  its  presence. "  The  Creed  of  Christ,  1 19. 


The  Gospel  15 

expressed  by  it  was  new  and  distinctively  his  own.  The 
kingdom  he  had  in  view  was  different  in  its  nature  and  its 
mode  of  coming  from  that  of  any  antecedent  prophecy. 
In  employing  the  formula  of  John  to  convey  a  new  mean- 
ing Jesus  was  following  the  way  of  all  religious  reformers, 
who  seek  to  link  their  new  teaching  with  the  old  beliefs 
in  order  to  gain  the  general  ear,  to  be  readily  understood 
a^nd  to  avoid  opposition  while  awakening  attention.  "On 
this  flexible  phrase,  with  its  capacity  for  spiritualisation, 
Jesus  fastened  when  he  would  describe  his  mission."1 
The  conception  of  the  Kingdom  as  the  establishment  of 
the  nation  in  righteousness  was  the  preserving  salt,  the 
one  redeeming  element,  in  the  fantastic  messianic  expecta- 
tions, and  this  Jesus  laid  hold  of  to  bring  into  clear 
prominence.  To  his  mind  "the  only  possible  Kingdom  of 
God  was  the  reign  of  righteousness  in  the  souls  of  individ- 
uals and  in  society  as  composed  of  individuals"  (Mackin- 
tosh). That  is,  the  moral  regeneration  of  the  people  was 
not  the  precondition  of  the  Kingdom,  but  the  Kingdom 
itself.  The  reign  of  righteousness  and  the  reign  of  God 
were  one  and  the  same  and  did  not  admit  of  being  viewed 
as  distinct  conceptions.  It  was  his  aim  to  appeal  to  the 
innate  ethical  sentiment  of  his  people,  to  deepen  and  purify 
their  idea  of  righteousness  and  thus  quietly  to  displace 
their  idea  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  by  one  radically  differ- 
ent— to  lead  their  thoughts  from  an  outward  Kingdom  of 
the  world  to  an  inward  Kingdom  of  the  spirit. 

It  follows  that  in  the  view  of  Jesus  the  coming  of  the 
Kingdom  could  be  in  no  wise  catastrophic,  for  it  was 
nothing  else  than  the  gradual  growth  of  a  better  life  in 
the  world.  Supernaturalism  in  any  form  was  something 
repugnant  to  his  religious  instinct,  resting  as  it  does  upon 
the  unavowed  dualism  which  conceives  nature  as  alien 
to  the  divine.  Thus  it  was  that  he  came  to  draw  from  the 

1  Peabody,  Jesus  Christ  and  the  Social  Question,  94. 


16  The  Gospel 

life  of  nature  the  figures  in  which  he  spoke  of  spiritual 
things;  for  the  analogies  between  the  natural  and  the 
spiritual  worlds,  Bacon  tells  us,  "Are  not  mere  similitudes, 
as  men  of  narrow  observation  may  conceive,  but  the  same 
footsteps  of  God  treading  and  printing  upon  several 
matters."  A  perfect  social  state,  the  golden  age  of 
righteousness  and  of  the  blessedness  it  brings,  could  only 
come  in  the  continuous  evolution  of  a  germ  of  life  latent 
in  the  nature  of  man :  "So  is  the  Kingdom  of  God  as  if  a 
man  should  cast  seed  into  the  ground  and  should  sleep  and 
rise  night  and  day  and  the  seed  should  spring  and  grow 
up,  he  knoweth  not  how.  For  the  earth  bringeth  forth 
fruit  of  herself:  first  the  blade,  then  the  ear  and  then  the 
full  corn  in  the  ear."  The  seed  and  the  soil  are  made  for 
one  another.  When  the  soil  with  its  properties  receives 
the  seed  with  its  properties  there  springs  from  it  a  new 
life.  So  it  is  with  human  nature  and  the  influence  of  the 
divine.  The  spiritual  seed  may  be  scarcely  perceptible, 
but  it  holds  the  power  of  a  mighty  growth;  even  as  the 
mustard  seed,  the  least  of  all  seeds,  "becometh  a  tree,  so 
that  the  birds  of  the  air  lodge  in  the  branches  thereof." 
These  simple  parables  anticipate  our  latest  science  which 
applies  to  social  progress  that  principle  of  development 
which  works  in  the  process  of  nature.  And  as  these  tell  of 
the  Kingdom's  organic  growth,  another  describes  it  as  an 
active  energy:  "The  Kingdom  of  God  is  like  unto  leaven 
which  a  woman  took  and  hid  in  three  measures  of  meal 
till  the  whole  was  leavened." x  So  then  there  was  no  need 

1  We  read  in  Mark  iv,  11-12,  that  only  to  the  inner  circle  of  disciples 
was  it  given  to  know  the  mystery  of  the  Kingdom  of  God,  while  those  with- 
out it  were  addressed  in  parables,  so  that  they  might  not  perceive  nor 
understand,  lest  they  should  be  converted  and  forgiven.  This  view  of  the 
parables  as  an  esoteric  teaching  requiring  a  special  interpretation  is  a 
ludicrous  blunder,  and  the  motive  alleged  for  the  parabolic  method  a 
calumny  on  Jesus.  It  seems  that  the  Evangelist,  duped  by  a  word,  con- 
fuses the  parables  of  Jesus  with  the  allegories  of  the  Apocalypses,  and 


The  Gospel  17 

of  new  heavens  and  a  new  earth,  but  rather  that  men 
should  open  their  eyes  to  the  presence  of  the  Divine 
Spirit  here  and  now  in  the  course  of  nature  and  the  con- 
sciousness of  men.  As  electricity  has  always  been  a 
force  conditioning  the  physical  life  of  man,  but  has  only 
recently  become  known  and  turned  to  man's  uses,  so  the 
reign  of  God  through  the  spiritual  laws  that  guide  and 
govern  human  life  had  always  been  existent  among 
men,  only  it  had  been  latent  and  unperceived.  What 
Jesus  did  was  to  reveal  it.  He  did  not  found  the  Kingdom, 
he  disclosed  it  to  men's  eyes;  he  told  them  of  its  nature 
and  showed  them  the  way  to  enter  it.  For  in  a  sense  it 
was  already  come,  or  if  men  would  only  enter  it  that  would 
be  its  coming;  as  they  give  themselves  to  God  and  good- 
ness they  work  with  Him  to  bring  the  Kingdom,  already 
here  in  promise  and  potency,  to  full  realisation  in  the  life 
of  the  world.  Thus  it  is  that  Jesus  speaks  of  the  Kingdom 
now  as  existent  and  again  as  still  to  come.  It  was  here, 
as  a  mustard  seed,  in  his  own  life  and  in  the  lives  of 
disciples  who  through  sympathy  with  him  had  gained  a 
new  religious  consciousness;  and  from  this  beginning  it 
would  gradually  extend  its  sway  over  society  at  large. 
To  the  Pharisee's  question  when  the  Kingdom  of  God 
should  come,  he  replied:  "The  Kingdom  of  God  cometh 
not  with  observation;  neither  shall  they  say,  Lo  here,  or 
Lo  there,  for,  behold,  the  Kingdom  of  God  is  within  you."1 

having  in  mind  the  failure  of  the  Gospel  preaching  among  the  Jewish  people 
as  a  whole,  offers  in  its  explanation  this  theory  that  Jesus  spoke  in  parables 
in  order  not  to  be  understood.  In  truth  of  course  he  taught  in  parables 
because  that  is  an  admirably  vivid  and  effective  way  of  teaching.  His 
parable  discovers  a  natural  analogy  which  mirrors  a  spiritual  truth;  an 
allegory  on  the  other  hand  is  an  artificial  construction,  and  to  give  the 
parables  of  Jesus  an  allegorical  interpretation  leads  to  strangely  disastrous 
results,  as  may  be  gathered  from  Patristic  writings  and  the  well-known 
work  of  Archbishop  Trench. 

1  "That  the  Kingdom  of  God  is  'within  you,'  in  your  hearts,  is  the  only 
possible  meaning  of  trrbs  \>p.Qv\  'in  your  midst,'  in  your  vicinity,  would  be 


1  8  The  Gospel 

That  is,  the  Kingdom  has  its  seat  in  the  hearts  of  men;  it  is 
in  its  nature  an  inward  thing,  a  state  or  character  of  soul 
that  shall  by  degrees  pervade  and  actuate  society.  If  in 
one  view  it  is  a  divine  social  order  taking  the  place  of  those 
founded  on  principles  unsound  or  iniquitous,  it  is  also  and 
first  of  all  the  dominating  influence  of  God  in  the  lives  of 
individual  men.  It  is  the  rule  of  God  over,  or  rather  in, 
the  conscience  and  the  will,  freely  recognised  by  men  and 
fixing  them  in  righteousness  —  not  a  special  religious  kind 
of  righteousness,  but  that  which  concerns  the  ordinary 
conduct  and  the  common  relations  of  life.  Do  not  give 
way  to  anger,  be  forgiving,  turn  from  evil  thoughts,  do 
not  judge  your  fellow-men,  be  not  ostentatiously  pious,  nor 
think  you  can  pay  acceptable  worship  to  God  while  at 
variance  with  your  brother,  be  truthful,  let  your  word  be 
binding  as  an  oath,  be  merciful  and  charitable,  return 
good  for  evil  ;  he  that  doeth  these  sayings  builds  his  house 
upon  a  rock.  It  is  as  simple  as  that.  It  is  in  such  things 
as  these  that  the  Kingdom  consists,  and  there  is  no  hint 
of  anything  else.  And  so  the  Kingdom  of  God  which 
had  been  pictured  to  fancy  was  now  to  reveal  itself  in 
the  heart.  The  Jews  looked  for  a  transformation  of  the 


expressed  by  lv  /*6rw  iVtw?."  This  pronouncement  of  Pfleiderer  may  not 
meet  with  acceptance  from  all  Greek  scholars,  but  obviously  the  rendering 
"within  you"  is  the  one  that  goes  better  with  the  context.  The  conjunc- 
tion "for"  introduces  an  explanation  of  something  previously  said,  or  gives 
a  reason  for  it,  and  here  it  is  the  inward  nature  of  the  Kingdom  that  explains 
why  it  cannot  be  seen  and  located.  If  it  were  its  presence  among  men  that 
Jesus  declared  we  should  rather  expect  him  to  say,  the  Kingdom  cannot  be 
perceived  although  it  is  in  your  midst.  It  is  a  common  objection  that 
Jesus  was  addressing  the  Pharisees  and  could  not  have  said  to  them,  the 
Kingdom  of  God  is  within  you.  But  surely  "you"  is  to  be  taken  here  in 
the  abstract  sense,  as  if  we  should  say  to  a  discontented  egoist  grumbling 
at  human  life,  the  sources  of  happiness  are  within  you.  If,  however,  we 
adopt  the  other  reading  we  do  not  lose  the  substance  of  Jesus'  answer;  a 
kingdom  that  is  a  present  reality  and  yet  remains  invisible  can  only  be  a 
spiritual  Kingdom. 


The  Gospel  19 

present  "sorry  scheme  of  things"  into  a  perfect  social 
state,  a  creation  of  divine  omnipotence  which  should 
burst  in  sudden  splendor  on  a  passive  world;  the  trans- 
formation Jesus  hoped  for  was  one  that  should  take  place 
in  the  lives  of  men,  who  must  win  for  themselves  new 
hearts,  motives,  dispositions.  The  coming  of  the  reign  of 
God  meant  a  gradual  soul-growth, — of  the  individual  soul 
and  of  the  general  soul  of  man, — into  oneness  with  the 
indwelling  spirit  of  God.  The  Kingdom  of  God  is  within 
you :  these  words  of  Jesus,  revealing  the  meaning  and  the 
aim  of  life,  were  the  manifesto  of  his  religion,  and  "the 
hour  in  which  he  uttered  them  witnessed  the  birth  of 
Christianity."1  They  were  a  light  that  broke  through 
the  enveloping  fog  of  Jewish  messianism,  and  Paul  himself 
in  a  moment  of  clear  vision  could  say  of  the  Kingdom  that 
it  is  "righteousness  and  peace  and  joy  in  the  Holy  Ghost." 
Can  we  fail  to  see  how  widely  different  from  the  Kingdom 
of  Jewish  expectation  was  the  inward  and  spiritual  King- 
dom which  Jesus  announced;  is  it  not  plain  that  the 
negation  of  the  Jewish  idea  is  precisely  the  novelty  of  his 
doctrine  ?  On  this  point  Colani  sums  up  in  these  words : 

"Jesus  cleared  up  the  confusion  of  the  temporal  with  the 
spiritual  inherent  in  the  whole  theocratic  idea  of  Israel.  In 
his  conception  the  realisation  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  was  an 
ideal  humanity  where  no  trace  of  the  pretended  privilege  of  the 
Jew  was  to  be  found.  In  his  view  of  the  future  an  organic 
development  took  the  place  of  the  catastrophies  of  the  apo- 
calypses. In  a  word,  he  broke  with  messianism  which  con- 

1  "We  hold  that  this  was  the  grand  disclosure  which  Jesus  made  to  the 
world,  on  which  his  claim  to  a  unique  place  in  the  history  of  religion  may  be 
chiefly  rested."  Mackintosh,  The  Natural  History  of  the  Christian  Religion, 
156. 

"When  we  take  into  account  all  that  Jesus'  idea  of  the  Kingdom 
implies,  it  is  far  and  away  the  greatest  achievement  in  religious  thought 
which  the  world  has  witnessed."  A.  K.  Rogers,  The  Life  and  Teaching  of 
Jesus,  214. 


20  The  Gospel 

sisted  precisely  in  the  confusion  of  the  temporal  and  spiritual, 
in  the  haughty  affirmation  of  the  Jew's  right  to  the  exclusive 
regard  of  Providence,  and  in  the  expectation  of  a  sudden 
overthrow  of  all  things."1 

1  Jesus  Christ  et  les  Croyances  Messianigues  de  son  Temps,  103. 

It  seems  a  strange,  it  seems  a  perverse  blindness  to  what  is  palpably 
distinctive  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus  that  holds  him  to  have  been  possessed 
by  the  apocalyptic  conceptions  of  the  Kingdom  which  ruled  the  mind  of 
the  people.  In  a  recent  work — The  Historic  Jesus  by  C.  S.  Lester — we  find 
this  contention  maintained:  "It  needs  always  to  be  borne  in  mind  that 
Jesus  expected  the  Kingdom  of  God  to  come  suddenly,  quickly,  and  super- 
naturally,  God  Himself  appearing  in  the  clouds  to  establish  His  personal 
reign" — p.  138.  This  statement  is  repeated  in  nearly  the  same  terms  on 
pp.  158  and  182.  A  little  later  the  author  dimly  perceives  that  his  position 
involves  him  in  some  difficulty.  On  p.  242  we  read:  "It  is  perfectly  evi- 
dent that  Jesus  shared  the  popular  belief  that  the  Kingdom  of  God  meant 
the  establishment  of  God's  personal  sovereignty  over  the  Jewish  people, 
and  that  he  derived  his  overwhelming  enthusiasm  from  his  belief  that  the 
great  catastrophe  would  happen  suddenly  and  soon.  He  could  not  there- 
fore have  taught  the  entirely  contradictory  belief  that  the  Kingdom  was  to 
be  a  gradual  and  invisible  growth  in  human  hearts,  and  it  is  necessary  to 
find  some  way  to  reconcile  this  apparent  contradiction  in  his  teaching." 
It  need  hardly  be  said  that  the  endeavor  to  find  this  way  of  reconciliation 
can  only  meet  with  failure.  The  way  the  author  finds  is  to  assert  that  the 
Kingdom  of  God  within  men  must  mean  their  inward  conviction  that  the 
Kingdom  of  the  popular  belief  was  near  at  hand,  which  seems  a  scarcely 
satisfactory  interpretation;  and  ths  "apparent"  contradiction  is  rather 
accentuated  than  reconciled  by  reference  to  the  words  of  Jesus  in  the 
"Synoptic  Apocalypse"  which,  as  will  appear  later,  are  not  his  words  at  all. 
A  remark  of  Harnack's  seems  pertinent  here:  "It  is  considered  a  perverse 
procedure  to  judge  eminent,  epoch-making  personalities  first  and  foremost 
by  what  they  share  with  their  contemporaries,  and  on  the  other  hand  to 
put  what  is  great  and  characteristic  in  them  into  the  background."  The 
following  citation  from  Mackintosh  (op.  cit.  144-145.)  seems  to  dispose  of 
the  matter  in  question:  "Jesus'  simple  fundamental  proposition  with 
regard  to  it  was  that  the  Kingdom  was  within  men,  i.  e.,  spiritual  and  ideal; 
and  this  proposition — whose  authenticity  is  guaranteed  by  the  fact  of  its 
being  reported  as  his  by  men  to  whose  ideas  on  the  subject  it  ran  counter — 
must  be  held  to  control  the  interpretation  of  all  his  utterances  concerning 
it,  whether  made  by  himself  or  by  disciples  in  his  name.  .  .  .  And  the 
circumstance  that  the  personal  followers  of  Jesus  clung  to  the  idea  of  a 
second  advent  and  a  new  earth  is  a  proof  not  that  Jesus  had  given  en- 
couragement to  such  an  idea,  but  that  inherited  Jewish  notions  retained  a 
hold  of  their  minds  in  spite  of  his  teaching,  and  that  the  natural  tendency  to 


The  Gospel  21 

Jesus  tells  us  in  his  figurative  way  of  speech  that  the 
Kingdom  of  heaven,  or  eternal  life — we  find  in  Mark 
ix,  43-47,  that  the  two  expressions  are  synonymous — is 
the  treasure  hid  in  the  field,  or  the  pearl  of  great  price 
which  men  sell  all  they  own  to  buy;  that  is,  it  is  the  one 
goal  and  prize  of  human  striving.  And  if  it  comes  from 
a  radical  change  for  the  better  in  the  hearts  and  wills  of 
men,  then  so  far  from  being  a  work  of  God  independent  of 
human  co-operation,  there  can  be  no  coming  of  the  King- 
dom until  men  become  workers  together  with  God.  There 
are  no  divine  forces  that  can  make  men  righteous  without 
effort  of  their  own.  The  ideal  social  state  is  not  an  order 
from  which  men  acquire  holiness,  but  one  to  which  they 
give  it.  Jewish  piety  was  quietism;  it  was  typified  in 
Simeon,  "waiting  for  the  consolation  of  Israel."  This 
was  the  watchword,  "wait" — wait  for  a  salvation  that 
should  be  brought  to  the  chosen  people  by  a  sovereign 
act  of  God,  and  in  no  sense  effected  by  an  act  of  their  own. 
Such  reliance  on  divine  interposition  was  fatal  to  all 
strenuous  moral  effort.  The  Jews  looking  to  Jehovah  to 
save  them  were  like  the  peasant  who  called  on  Zeus  to 
lift  his  mired  cart,  and  Jehovah  gave  them  the  god's  reply. 
The  Kingdom  was  not  to  be  waited  for,  but  worked  for; 
it  would  not  come  upon  them  from  above,  for  it  must 
spring  up  from  within.  "The  Kingdom  of  heaven,"  said 

exchange  the  pure  idea  for  a  sensuous  embodiment  of  it  was  too  strong  for 
them  and  prevented  them  from  entering  fully  into  his  thought.  For  such 
reasons  we  are  disposed  not  to  accept  as  genuine  any  language  attributed  to 
him  which  is  inconsistent  with  the  idea." 

To  "the  scholar  who  recognises  the  inevitable  retouching  of  any  words  of 
Jesus  on  this  subject  in  view  of  the  current  apocalyptic  ideas"  (Schmidt) 
it  will  be  evident  that  the  apocalyptic  Jesus  of  Mr.  Lester's  book  is  not  the 
Jesus  of  history.  If  that  Jesus  had  indeed  shared  the  delusions  of  his 
countrymen,  or  if  his  Gospel  of  a  spiritual  Kingdom  had  not  survived  in  the 
hearts  of  his  followers — overlaid  and  almost  smothered  though  it  was  by 
Jewish  messianism — Christianity  as  the  world  knows  it  never  would  have 
come  into  existence. 


22  The  Gospel 

Jesus,  "is  broken  into  and  the  violent  take  it  by  force." 
It  was  the  language  of  hyperbole  to  mark  the  contrast 
between  the  Kingdom  of  his  message  and  that  of  the 
messianic  hope;  it  summoned  men  to  drop  their  attitude 
of  passive  expectancy,  of  dependence  on  supernatural 
aid,  for  the  exertion  of  a  resolute  moral  energy.  Simple 
as  this  may  seem,  it  is  enough,  if  it  be  acted  on,  to  change 
the  whole  aspect  of  religion,  the  whole  character  of  the 
spiritual  life.  Unhappily  it  is  not  always  acted  on. 
Multitudes  of  Christians  have  reverted  to  the  Jewish 
passivity,  trusting  to  the  Saviour  Christ  to  do  for  them 
what  they  do  not  try  to  do  for  themselves. 

The  Gospel  of  the  Kingdom  is  not  merely  a  religion  for 
the  saving  of  one's  soul,  but  for  the  salvation  of  the  world. 
It  teaches  that  a  man's  religion  is  not  merely  his  own 
affair,  but  a  social  obligation ;  that  religion  must  become  a 
social  force  to  permeate  all  human  relationships — domestic, 
commercial,  political  and  every  other — to  change  and 
regenerate  all  human  living.  How  is  this  to  be  attained? 
Tp  better  the  affairs  of  men  by  efforts  from  outside  them 
is  a  method  tried  again  and  again  and  always  cheating 
expectation.  The  world  is  noisy  with  attempts  to  reform 
society  by  some  scheme  of  corporate  action  by  which  we 
may  sit  still  and  be  made  into  the  right  kind  of  men,  but 
history  records  nothing  more  futile  than  the  efforts  to 
realise  outwardly  a  social  Utopia  that  has  never  been  in- 
wardly realised,  to  elevate  the  masses  without  touching 
the  units  of  the  mass,  to  fashion  individuals  after  some 
social  type  rather  than  to  reorganise  society  through  the 
regeneration  of  its  individual  members.  It  is  a  prevalent 
belief  that  the  way  to  a  perfect  social  state  is  by  providing 
men  with  a  set  of  perfect  circumstances,  relying  upon 
things  to  be  done  for  us  rather  than  things  to  be  done  by 
us ;  but  the  social  order  is  a  product  not  of  mechanism  but 
of  personality,  social  problems  are  human  problems  and 


The  Gospel  23 

there  is  no  settlement  that  does  not  reach  to  the  characters 
of  men.1  New  machineries  will  be  tried  in  vain  unless 
there  is  a  new  humanity  behind  them.  You  cannot  make 
new  cards  by  shuffling  the  pack,  and  you  cannot  produce 
a  new  society  by  mechanical  rearrangement  of  its  elements 
unchanged.  To  remake  human  conditions  you  must 
remake  men.2  This  was  the  method  of  Jesus;  it  is  the 
radical  method,  the  one  that  goes  to  the  root  of  the 
matter.  He  saw  that  before  his  Gospel  could  take  effect 
upon  Jewish  society  it  had  first  to  take  effect  on  the 
individuals  composing  it.  He  saw  that  to  reach  the 
individual  is  the  way  to  reach  society,  and  the  only  way. 3 
He  had  no  faith  in  adjustments  of  environment;  he  had 
faith  only  in  inwardness  and  self-reconstruction.  He 
went  to  the  depths  of  the  individual  soul  for  the  re-creative 
energies  that  should  produce  a  new  society.  He  felt  that 
if  he  could  make  men,  the  men  would  make  the  kingdom. 
And  so  his  aim  was  to  inspire,  and  spiritually  energise  the 
personal  life,  and  from  that  starting-point  the  life  of  man- 
kind. This  was  to  work  not  for  an  age  but  for  all  time; 
and  still  today  he  calls  us  back  from  all  quack  panaceas 
for  the  world's  reform  to  the  reform  of  our  own  selves,  the 
one  thing  needed.  We  find  him  regarding  all  social  issues 

1  For  some  vigorous  writing  on  the  effect  of  State  paternalism  upon 
individual  character  see  Germany  and  the  Germans  by  Price  Collier,  365- 

367. 

a"La  plupart  des  esprits  sont  m6caniques,  et  croient  qu'en  changeant 
les  rouages  on  change  les  homines."  G.  Hanotaux,  Jeanne  Dare,  147. 
This  is  the  author's  comment  on  the  proceedings  of  the  Council  of  Basle 
and  explains  why  the  efforts  of  the  Churchmen  came  to  nothing,  though 
the  word  Reform  was  on  the  lips  of  all  men.  At  this  moment  the  effects 
of  individual  initiative  were  seen  in  pointed  contrast.  The  awakening  of 
France  was  due  to  the  inspiring  personality  of  the  Maid,  evoking  a  re- 
sponsive outburst  of  patriotic  ardor  from  the  hearts  of  the  people. 

3  "The  religion  Jesus  brought  into  the  world  is  something  personal. 
In  the  strict  sense  it  can  never  be  realised  save  in  individuals,  and  Christians 
are  at  all  times  single  individuals."  Wernle,  The  Beginnings  of  Chris- 
tianity, ii,  343. 


24  The  Gospel 

with  a  certain  detachment  and  unconcern,  as  of  one  whose 
eye  is  fixed  upon  an  end  in  which  they  will  find  their  own 
solution.  He  knew  no  social  classes,  no  distinctions  of 
rich  and  poor,  educated  and  ignorant :  he  dealt  with  men 
as  men.  His  approach  to  the  world's  life  was  from  within, 
and  his  fixed  faith  that  all  advance  to  a  higher  human  life 
must  begin  where  alone  ideas  and  aspirations  can  have 
birth,  in  the  minds  and  hearts  of  men. *  Hence  the  call  of 
the  Gospel  was  addressed  not  to  the  masses  but  to  individ- 
uals, receptive  hearers  whom  Jesus  sought  to  imbue  with 
the  spirit  of  his  own  life. 2  He  concentrated  his  efforts  on 
the  individual  soul,  and  looked  to  its  faithfulness,  its 
energy  of  conscience,  its  warmth  of  generous  affection  for 
the  initiative  in  the  happy  change  the  ages  should  bring 
in  the  life  of  the  world.  For  the  communication  of  vitality 
from  these  quickened  single  lives  would  be  the  coming  of 
the  Kingdom.  ''The  blessed  influence  of  one  true  loving 
human  soul  upon  another"  is  an  energy  constantly  at 
work  throughout  the  world  of  men,  not  calculable  by 
mathematics,  but  mighty  as  the  power  of  attraction  by 
which  one  planet  shapes  another's  course.  And  it  is  this 
that  brings  nearer  that  Kingdom  of  God  for  which  else  we 
sigh  and  scheme  in  vain.  And  so  the  men  who  followed 
Jesus,  who  had  ears  to  hear  him,  were  as  a  salt,  a  light,  a 
leaven  in  the  world, — a  force,  that  is,  that  works  unseen 
and  silently  like  every  vital  force.  By  simply  living 

1  "Reverence  for  the  individual  and  the  never-failing  faith  that  the  best 
and  highest  good  must  be  given  to  men  from  within,  by  directly  touching 
the  springs  of  action  and  renovating  the  elements  of  character — not  from 
without,  by  changing  their  surroundings — this  is  the  distinctive  mark  of 
Christianity;  and  when  we  forget  this  we  cease  to  be  the  disciples  of  Jesus." 
Carpenter  and  Wicksteed,  Studies  in  Theology,  290. 

2  "The  method  of  Jesus  was  the  successive  winning  of  separate  souls, 
now  an  Andrew,  now  a  Peter,  now  a  Philip,  until  he  had  discovered  and 
drawn  to  himself  a  few  men  and  women  fitted  to  herald  and  inaugurate  a 
higher  and  more  perfect  social  life."     McConnell,  Christianity:  an  Inter- 
pretation, 197. 


The  Gospel  25 

their  own  new  life  these  men  would  change  other  lives 
into  their  likeness  by  contact  of  life  with  life.  And  this  is 
matter  of  history ;  it  was  in  this  way  the  Christian  Brother- 
hood took  rise. x 

It  is  evident  that  just  because  it  is  so  intensely  personal 
the  Gospel  is  a  universal  message.  If  its  appeal  is  simply 
to  the  heart  and  soul,  it  appeals  to  humanity,  and  it  is 
not  the  Jew  but  the  man  who  has  it  in  him  to  become  a 
son  of  God.  This  implication  of  his  teaching  lay  in  its 
very  nature,  and  Jesus  did  not  fail  to  impress  it  upon  his 
narrow-minded  countrymen.  It  is  an  odd  misapprehen- 
sion that  looks  upon  the  Preacher  of  the  Gospel  as  only 
a  Jewish  reformer,  caring  only  for  his  own  people,  not 
looking  beyond  Palestine,  sent  only  to  the  lost  sheep  of  the 
house  of  Israel.  The  passages  in  Matthew  to  this  effect, 
taken  from  a  Jewish-Christian  source,  are  allowed  to 
stand  in  this  late  ecclesiastical  gospel  because  in  its  time 
the  question  of  the  restriction  of  the  Gospel  preaching  to 
the  Jews  had  long  ceased  to  be  one  of  practical  importance. 
In  the  episode  of  the  Centurion  (Matt,  viii)  we  find 
Jesus  saying  that  he  had  not  found  in  Israel  so  great  faith 
as  this  Gentile's,  and  that  many  should  come  from  the 
east  and  the  west  and  sit  down  with  the  patriarchs  in  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven.  The  parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan, 
an  alien  and  a  heretic,  shows  how  he  put  human  nature 
in  its  generality,  we  might  say  in  its  nudity,  above  all 
differences  of  race  or  religion.  The  Gospel  of  Jesus  could 
not  possibly  have  been  confined  within  the  narrow  limits 
of  Jewish  exclusiveness.  The  universalism  of  Chris- 
tianity was  not  an  idea  originated  by  St.  Paul,  but  he 
saw  clearly  what  Stephen  before  him  had  less  clearly  seen, 

1  "  The  regenerating  force  in  human  society  has  been  and  is  that  innumer- 
able company  of  men  and  women  who  have  been  transformed  in  the  image 
and  likeness  of  Christ.  Outwardly  they  look  and  act  much  as  other  men, 
but  essentially  they  are  new  creatures."  McConnell,  op.  cit.,  199. 


26  The  Gospel 

that  universalism  was  of  the  essence  of  the  Gospel;  for 
this  he  battled  with  the  Judaisers,  and  the  victory  he  did 
not  live  to  see  changed  the  faith  of  a  Jewish  sect  into  a 
world  religion.  That  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  derives  historic- 
ally from  the  religion  of  Israel — though  in  relation  to 
Judaism  it  was  rather  a  recoil  and  reaction  than  a  de- 
velopment— is  a  point  which  has  been  so  over-emphasised 
that  it  tends  to  obscure  the  essential  originality  of  Jesus' 
teaching. x  As  the  value  of  a  diamond  ring  is  in  the  stone, 
not  the  setting,  and  while  the  setting  is  in  the  taste  and 
workmanship  of  a  given  period,  the  diamond  is  for  all 
time :  so  the  antecedents  and  the  contemporary  surround- 
ings of  the  Gospel  are  matters  relatively  unimportant, 
and  it  remains  independent  of  external  conditions. 

That  Gospel  wakened  the  consciousness  of  a  personal 
relation  to  God  which,  being  one  and  the  same  for  all  men, 
shows  itself  to  be  the  human  relation;  that  is,  God  is  the 
God  of  mankind.  And  this  was  a  distinctly  new  idea. 
The  conception  of  monotheism  remained  undeveloped 
and  imperfect  in  the  religion  of  Israel.  The  effort  of  the 
earlier  prophets  was  to  suppress  the  prevalent  polytheistic 
worship  and  implant  the  conviction  that  Jehovah  was  the 
one  and  only  God  of  his  chosen  people.  Beyond  this 
no  appreciable  advance  was  made  before  the  captivity. 
Jeremiah  is  the  first  to  declare  that  the  gods  of  the  nations 
are  but  vanity  and  beside  the  God  of  Israel  there  exists 
no  other,  and  this  thought  is  dwelt  upon  with  greater 
fulness  and  emphasis  by  the  prophet  of  Babylon,  called 
the  Second  Isaiah.  But  this  was  still  a  particularistic  con- 
ception, a  monotheism  within  the  bounds  of  nationality. 

1  "  The  teaching  of  Jesus  will  at  once  bring  us  by  steps,  which  if  few,  will 
be  great,  to  a  height  where  its  connection  with  Judaism  is  seen  to  be  only 
a  loose  one,  and  most  of  the  threads  leading  from  it  into  contemporary 
history  become  of  no  importance  at  all."  Harnack,  What  is  Christianity 
(Eng.  tr.  of  Der  Wesen  des  Christentums) ,  17. 


The  Gospel  27 

It  was  not  a  universal  religion  that  the  prophets  opposed 
to  the  religions  of  the  nations,  but  merely  their  own 
national  religion,  and  it  was  their  expectation  that  the 
world  would  be  converted  to  the  worship  of  Israel's  God 
and  acknowledge  his  unshared  sovereignty.  The  mono- 
theism of  the  Gospel  breaks  down  all  fences  of  nation- 
alism because  its  God  is  not  the  God  of  a  nation 
but  of  the  individual,  of  man  simply  as  man.  To  this 
idea  not  even  the  noblest  of  the  prophets  was  able  to 
rise,  and  this  God  is  the  pivotal  centre  of  the  Gospel 
revelation. 

While  in  the  best  thought  of  the  people  the  Kingdom  of 
God  meant  the  sovereignty  of  the  Most  High  over  his 
human  subjects,  Jesus  conceived  it  as  the  union  of  God 
above  with  men  below,  through  their  sense  of  fellowship 
with  His  Spirit,  overcoming  the  old  abysmal  contrast  of 
human  and  divine.  We  come  a  little  closer  to  his  idea 
of  the  Kingdom  if  we  note  that  while  the  people  were 
taken  up  with  speculations  about  its  coming,  filling  in  the 
outlines  of  the  picture  according  to  their  fancies  and 
predilections,  Jesus  thought  first  of  all  about  God,  and  it 
was  his  conception  of  God,  not  as  an  almighty  Power  but 
an  unchanging  Love,  that  determined  his  conception  of 
the  Kingdom.  While  the  people  obeyed  in  fear  a  stern 
Lawgiver  and  Judge  who  had  laid  upon  weak  mankind  a 
yoke  of  exaction  too  heavy  for  it  to  bear,  Jesus  saw  in  God 
the  Father  of  men  who  had  loved  them  from  the  beginning 
of  the  world.  The  old  Scriptures  speak  of  God  as  the 
King  and  the  Holy  One  of  Israel;  they  know  Him  in  the 
attributes  of  righteousness  and  power.  Some  faint  in- 
tuition of  a  divine  love,  of  God  as  Father  of  the  nation, 
comes  indeed  to  the  tender-hearted  Hosea,  and  later 
prophets  repeat  the  name;  but  a  divine  fatherhood 
restricted  to  Israel  excludes  the  idea  of  the  universal 
fatherhood,  and  as  Father  of  the  personal  soul  He  is  not 


28  The  Gospel 

known.  x  The  Psalms,  for  all  their  personal  note,  appeal 
to  Him  by  other  names:  Saviour,  Shepherd,  Shield, 
Refuge,  Rock  of  salvation,  a  present  Help  in  trouble. 
And  now  the  later  day  of  Judaism  had  lost  the  prophetic 
inspiration,  and  the  Psalmist's  cry  of  the  heart,  My  God ! 
had  long  died  into  silence.  It  is  true  that  in  a  regular 
form  of  prayer  God  was  addressed  as  Father,  but  like  so 
much  in  Jewish  piety  that  seems  well  and  is  mere  seeming, 
the  name  was  empty  of  all  real  meaning.  The  Law  laid 
an  iron  grasp  upon  its  devotees;  they  were  subjects  and 
servants;  God  and  man  were  separated  by  a  gulf,  and  any 
immediate  communion  between  them  was  something  incon- 
ceivable. Just  this  immediate  communion  was  the  con- 
scious experience  of  Jesus,  and  his  experience  was  the 
revelation  of  God  to  men.  Father :  into  this  one  word  the 
whole  Gospel  contracts  and  coils  itself  up,  and  from  this  it 
expands  and  issues  forth.  Every  principle  of  its  teaching 
we  see  flowing  from  one  central  source,  this  all-comprehen- 
sive truth,  God's  fatherhood.  To  Jesus  God  and  Father 
were  synonymous;  Father  is  his  one  name  for  God — you 
will  find  he  never  calls  Him  by  any  other;  but  it  is  not  a 
question  of  texts,  the  fatherhood  of  God  is  the  very  at- 
mosphere and  climate  of  the  Gospel.  And  it  is  not  an 
aspect  or  an  ''attribute"  of  God,  but  constitutive  of  His 
being.  His  revelation  of  God  Jesus  brings  to  us  enshrined 
in  the  earliest  relationship  we  know,  yet  we  shall  miss  the 
truth  if  we  take  it  that  the  fatherhood  ascribed  to  God 
has  a  merely  figurative  significance.  Rather  is  the  term 
father  but  a  figure  when  applied  to  any  other.  God  does 
not  borrow  from  earth,  but  lends  to  it  in  human  father- 
hood a  simile  and  suggestion  of  His  own,  a  shadow  of  the 
eternal  substance.  God  is  not  like  a  father,  He  is  Father 
absolutely.  He  alone  is  the  Giver  of  life,  of  physical  life 
through  nature's  instrumentalities,  of  spiritual  life  distinct 
1  Hosea  xi,  i ;  Jer.  xxxi,  9;  Isaiah  Ixiii,  16. 


The  Gospel  29 

but  inseparable  from  His  own,  for  "in  Him  we  live  and 
move  and  have  our  being."  In  that  secret  communion 
with  God  which  led  Jesus  to  say,  "no  man  knoweth  the 
Father  save  the  son"  his  heart  discovered  that  an  eternal 
kindness  watches  over  human  life,  an  eternal  compassion 
is  poured  upon  its  struggle  and  its  sorrow.  If  the  people 
trembled  before  a  God  inexorably  pitiless,  visiting  the  sins 
of  the  fathers  upon  the  children,  Jesus  saw  the  Divine 
long-suffering  following  anxiously  the  sinner's  wayward 
course,  and  the  Divine  consolation  bending  to  the  cry  of 
the  troubled  hearts  of  men.  Such  a  new  idea  of  God 
brought  with  it  an  entirely  new  idea  of  religion,  and  made 
an  end  of  Judaism.  If  God  be  hard  and  severe,  then  it 
must  be  the  effort  of  religion  to  conciliate  Him.  There 
must  be  sacrifice  for  sin,  ascetic  practices  and  scrupulous 
obedience  to  the  letter  of  an  elaborate  law.  But  if  God  is 
a  Father,  then  the  only  religious  duty  is  to  love  him  with 
the  heart  of  a  child  responsive  to  a  father's  love;  for  God 
loves  men  because  they  are  His  children,  and  not  on 
account  of  their  religious  performances.  And  because 
He  is  their  Father  they  are  to  give  Him  obedience,  not 
from  hope  of  reward  or  fear  of  punishment.1  We  see 
then  the  meaning  of  the  saying,  "Whosoever  will  not 
receive  the  Kingdom  of  God  as  a  little  child,  he  cannot 
enter  therein."  It  is  one  of  many  that  exalt  childhood 
with  its  natural  inclination  to  reverence,  trust  and  love, 
as  a  type  of  the  character  befitting  the  human  children  of 
God.  With  childhood  in  its  smiling  innocence  and  glad- 
ness Jesus  was  peculiarly  sympathetic.  When  we  see 

1  "Where  remained  any  necessity  for  sacrifice,  for  the  temple  service, 
washings,  fasts,  tithes,  if  the  Father  asks  nothing  from  His  children  save  the 
heart?  Where  remained  the  Rabbi's  hope  of  keeping  God  to  the  fulfilment 
of  His  promises  according  to  contract?  Where  remained  the  exceptional 
position  of  the  Jews  and  their  claims  to  be  the  chosen  people?  One  part 
of  the  theocracy  after  another  collapsed,  for  its  foundations  had  given 
way."  Hausrath,  The  Time  of  Jesus,  ii,  148. 


30  The  Gospel 

him  taking  little  children  in  his  arms,  we  feel  that  he  is 
among  those  of  like  nature  with  himself.  For  the  Child 
lived  in  the  Man:  with  all  a  man's  heroic  courage,  with 
all  his  force  and  fire  of  intense  earnestness,  there  dwelt  the 
freedom  and  freshness  of  an  entirely  unspoilt  and  simple 
heart,  resting  in  happy  trustfulness  on  the  Father's  love. 

It  follows  from  the  new  idea  of  God  that  the  coming  of 
the  Kingdom  would  be  the  winning  of  such  a  quality  of 
soul  as  puts  men  in  true  relations  with  Him;  and  this  is 
the  theme  of  the  first  group  of  Sayings  (Logia)  in  the  gos- 
pel of  Matthew.  The  first  step  toward  renovation  of  the 
elements  of  character  must  be  a  sense  of  dissatisfaction 
with  one's  present  self,  a  sense  of  want  or  penury.  There- 
fore "  Blessed  are  the  poor  in  spirit,  for  theirs  is  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven, " — rather  than  theirs  who  trust  in 
themselves  that  they  are  righteous.  Then  comes  the 
further  step : ' '  Blessed  are  they  that  hunger  and  thirst  after 
righteousness,  for  they  shall  be  filled";  or  blessed  is  the 
eager  aspiration  to  the  moral  ideal,  the  intense  longing  for 
inward  goodness,  for  it  shall  be  satisfied.  And  would  we 
know  the  traits  of  this  goodness :  Blessed  are  the  mild,  the 
merciful,  the  pure  in  heart,  blessed  are  they  that  work  for 
peace  on  earth ;  yet  not  peace  by  the  surrender  of  principle : 
" blessed  are  they  that  are  persecuted  for  righteousness' 
sake,  for  theirs  is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven." 

In  these  Beatitudes  we  have  what  Neander  called  the 
Magna  Charta  of  the  Kingdom  of  God.  These  inward 
dispositions  of  the  soul,  and  such  as  these,  are  the  keys 
of  the  Kingdom,  the  requisites  for  admission.  And  these 
are  all  that  is  required.  There  is  no  mention  of  the  con- 
fession of  a  creed,  or  participation  in  ritual  observances, 
or  deference  to  ecclesiastical  authority;  the  qualities  of 
character  whose  possessbrs  are  called  blessed  are  enough 
to  fit  them  for  the  Kingdom,  to  assure  their  eternal  life, 
their  salvation.  A  dogmatic  creed,  the  creation  of  the 


The  Gospel  31 

Christian  religion,  was  indeed  something  unknown  to 
Judaism,  but  that  religion  was  essentially  a  matter  of 
ritualistic  practices.  In  old  Israel  centuries  earlier  the 
question  whether  the  chief  concern  of  religion  was  with 
righteousness  or  ritual  had  arrayed  the  prophet  against  the 
priest  in  a  long  contest  that  ended  in  the  triumph  of  the 
priestly  conception  of  religious  duty  as  consisting  mainly 
in  the  performance  of  liturgical  rites  rather  than  in  the 
consecration  of  life.  Even  the  prophet  of  the  Jordan  was 
not  able  to  free  himself  from  the  influence  of  the  dominant 
formalism,  and  though  preaching  a  religion  of  the  simple 
moralities — honesty,  purity,  and  kindliness,  at  the  same 
time  imposed  his  rite  of  baptism  as  a  necessary  sign  and  seal 
of  qualification  for  entrance  into  the  messianic  kingdom. 
This  was  only  to  replace  the  formalism  of  the  Pharisee 
with  a  formalism  of  his  own,  and  he  seemed  for  a  moment 
to  become  aware  of  the  inconsistency  that  compromised 
his  work  of  reform  when  he  met  the  Pharisees,  who  came 
to  him,  with  the  hot  words:  "Brood  of  vipers,  who  hath 
warned  you  to  flee  from  the  wrath  to  come?"  He  saw 
that  in  asking  to  be  baptised  they  were  merely  following 
their  ordinary  procedure  of  seeking  salvation  by  external 
practices ;  it  was  possible  then  for  one  to  be  in  the  number 
of  his  disciples  without  any  moral  amendment.  Pharisa- 
ism he  well  knew  for  a  parade  of  piety  to  be  seen  of  men. 
It  is  because  he  made  religion  an  unreality,  a  sham,  that 
the  term  inseparably  associated  with  the  Pharisee  is 
hypocrite — play-actor.  It  was  inevitable  that  the  attitude 
of  the  Prophet  of  Nazareth  should  raise  again  the  old 
issue  between  outward  form  and  inward  spirit,  and  he 
met  it  squarely.  The  Sabbath  rest,  which  Deuteronomy 
places  on  humanitarian  grounds,  had  become  a  barren 
taboo  among  the  Jews,  and  Jesus  swept  away  the  senseless 
and  vexatious  restrictions  its  strict  observance  imposed 
by  that  declaration  of  supreme  common  sense:  "The 


32  The  Gospel 

Sabbath  was  made  for  man,  not  man  for  the  Sabbath; 
Therefore  man  is  lord  of  the  Sabbath."1  This  was  to  call 
on  men  to  exercise  their  own  moral  judgment  and  free 
themselves  from  bondage  to  the  rule  of  tradition,  and  this 
implication  did  not  escape  the  Prophet's  adversaries.  It 
was  his  persistent  Sabbath-breaking  that  alarmed  the 
Pharisees  and  led  them  to  take  counsel  against  him  how 
they  might  destroy  him.  (Mark  iii,  6.) 

Again,  when  certain  Scribes  and  Pharisees,  coming 
spying  upon  him  from  Jerusalem,  took  offence  because  his 
disciples  "ate  bread  with  defiled — that  is  to  say,  un- 
washened — hands,"  neglecting  the  elaborate  ceremonial 
of  ablution  prescribed  by  the  tradition  of  the  elders, 
Jesus  turned  on  them  in  indignation,  denouncing  their 

1  The  Aramaic  word  for  man  is  a  compound  word  and  "son  of  man" 
means  man  and  nothing  more.  The  early  Christians  took  it  for  a  messianic 
title,  and  therefore  it  would  be  supposed  that  in  these  words  Jesus  was 
claiming  the  Messiah's  prerogative  to  supersede  the  law.  This  is  incon- 
sistent with  the  argument  of  the  text,  which  makes  the  lordship  of  the 
Sabbath  the  consequence  of  the  Sabbath  being  made  for  man,  and  it  is  at 
variance  with  the  whole  tenor  of  the  synoptic  narrative  in  which  there  is  no 
mention  of  any  messianic  claim  on  the  part  of  Jesus  prior  to  the  journey  to 
Jerusalem. 

The  difficulty  as  to  the  meaning  of  the  title  "Son  of  Man, "  so  frequently 
recurring  in  the  Synoptics  is  wholly  due  to  an  unfortunate  mistranslation  of 
the  Aramaic  phrase.  For  that  s  what  it  came  to  when  bar  nasha  was 
translated  literally  "the  son  of  man,"  instead  of  "the  man,"  as  would  be 
the  rendering  n  idiomatic  Greek,  and  which  in  English  would  be  simply 
man, — as  man  is  English  for  I'homme.  The  passages  in  the  gospels  where 
this  term  appears  in  a  messianic  sense  cannot  be  regarded  as  belonging  to 
the  oldest  tradition,  but  point  clearly  to  a  derivation  from  the  apocalyptic 
terminology  and  the  "dogma-building  consciousness"  of  the  early  church. 
Pfleiderer  concludes  a  discussion  of  this  question  in  these  words:  " So  much 
I  hold  to  be  certain,  that  all  sayings  with  which  the  use  of  the  title  Son  of 
Man  as  a  messianic  self -designation  is  connected  are  not  derived  from  Jesus 
himself,  since  this  self-designation  cannot  possibly  be  supposed  to  be  used 
by  him."  Primitive  Christianity,  ii,  475-482. 

For  an  exhaustive  treatment  of  the  subject,  coming  to  the  same  con- 
clusion, see  Schmidt,  The  Prophet  of  Nazareth,  Ch.  v,  and  the  same  writer's 
article  Son  of  Man  in  the  Encyclopedia  Biblica. 


The  Gospel  33 

formalism,  or  "hypocrisy,"  and  their  tradition  that 
"made  void  the  word  of  God."  And  then  he  called  the 
people  to  him  and  said:  Listen  to  me  every  one  of  you 
and  understand:  nothing  that  enters  into  a  man  from 
without  can  defile  him,  but  only  that  which  comes  forth 
from  the  man — the  evil  passions  and  purposes  that  come 
from  within  the  heart.  This  he  said,  comments  ,the 
Evangelist,  ' '  making  all  meats  clean. ' ' x  And  this  declara- 
tion implies  the  general  truth  that  "there  is  no  religious 
or  moral  obligation  to  avoid  what  does  not  defile  the  soul, 
or  to  practise  what  does  not  purify  the  life;  and  that  such 
avoidance  and  such  practices  are  neither  binding  on  the 
conscience  nor  acceptable  to  God."2  It  is  plain  that  the 
whole  question  of  ceremonial  purity  was  disposed  of  by 
this  principle  of  inwardness  which  brings  everything  to  the 
heart  of  man  for  valuation,  and  that  the  foundation  of  the 
whole  system  of  Jewish  externalism  was  undermined  and 
swept  away. 3  That  this  must  be  the  effect  of  his  Gospel, 

1  Mark  vii,  1-23.  a  Mackintosh,  op.  cit.,  175. 

3  "When  we  examine  the  relation  of  Jesus  to  the  Jewish  law  we  shall  do 
well  to  leave  on  one  side  the  statement  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount, '  I  am 
not  come  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil '  and  simply  look  at  the  facts.  That  state- 
ment belongs  to  he  age  after  Paul  and  is  intended  to  formulate  the  result 
of  the  struggles  of  the  apostolic  age  from  the  early  Catholic  standpoint. 
One  reason  is  sufficient  to  show  that  it  cannot  be  ascribed  to  Jesus,  for  its 
form  betrays  a  theologian  for  whom  the  question,  'destruction  or  fulfil- 
ment' of  the  law  implied  a  problem  to  be  solved."  Wernle,  Beginnings  of 
Christianity,  i,  88. 

It  is  plain  at  any  rate  that  he  two  following  verses  (Matt,  v,  18-19) 
come  from  a  Judaizing  source,  and  the  reprehension  of  those  who  "shall 
teach  men  so  "  can  only  refer  to  the  Paulinists.  Removing  these  two  verses 
there  appears  a  close  connection  of  17  with  20:  I  come  not  to  destroy  but 
to  fulfil — or  complete.  For  I  say  unto  you  that  except  your  righteousness 
exceed,  etc. ;  and  then  follows  the  showing  of  what  is  meant  by  "  exceeding 
or  "completing."  While  thus  it  may  be  possible  to  save  v,  17;  Wernle  is 
probably  right  in  rejecting  it.  The  saying  "  I  am  not  come  to  destroy  but 
to  fulfil"  expresses  the  attitude  of  the  Church  which  looked  on  Christ  as 
the  giver  of  the  "new  law,"  who  had  not  done  away  with  the  old,  but 
rather  fulfilled  it  through  amplification  and  a  deeper  interpretation. 


34  The  Gospel 

that  it  was  irreconcilable  with  Judaism  and  destructive  of 
it,  Jesus  plainly  intimates  in  two  parabolic  sayings  whose 
significance  extends  beyond  reference  to  the  special 
occasion  of  their  utterance.  The  Baptist  had  not  only 
introduced  a  new  rite  but  adopted  an  old  "practice." 
When  his  disciples  came  to  Jesus  saying,  "Why  do  we 
and  the  Pharisees  fast  oft,  but  thy  disciples  fast  not?" 
he  answered  them  (according  to  Luke):  No  one  patches 
an  old  garment  with  a  piece  from  a  new  one,  for  that  is  to 
tear  up  the  new  garment,  and  after  all  the  new  will  not 
match  the  old;  and  no  one  puts  new  wine  into  old  skins, 
for  it  will  burst  the  skins  and  be  spilled. z 

But  what  of  the  moral  law?  To  some  of  the  Prophet's 
hearers  the  teaching  of  the  Beatitudes  must  have  seemed 
vague  and  in  the  air;  to  leave  out  all  insistence  on  the 
regulation  of  conduct  was  to  make  things  all  too  easy. 
Jesus  tells  them  that  the  inward  goodness  is  harder  as  well 
as  higher  than  any  outward  rectitude,  and  his  demands 
more  rigorous  than  those  of  the  Pharisaic  moralist:  "I 
say  unto  you,  except  your  righteousness  shall  exceed  the 
righteousness  of  the  Scribes  and  Pharisees  ye  shall  in  no 
case  enter  into  the  Kingdom  of  heaven."  It  seemed 
impossible  to  exceed  the  righteousness  of  the  Pharisees 
with  its  strict  and  searching  regulation  of  men's  minutest 
actions,  but  the  new  righteousness  will  "exceed"  by  a 

1  Matt,  ix,  14, 17 ;  Mark  ii,  18,22-,  Luke  v,  33-39. 

"So  far  as  regards  the  special  case  of  his  disciples,  Jesus  answered  that 
for  them  in  their  present  mood  of  joyful  exaltation  fasting  would  be  as 
unreasonable  as  for  the  friends  of  the  bridegroom  on  the  marriage  day. 
That  is  the  simple  sense  of  the  image  in  Mark  ii,  19,  which  is  not  to  be 
allegorised  as  if  Jesus  intended  to  represent  himself  as  the  bridegroom  of  his 
people,  i.e.  as  the  Messiah.  But  even  this  Evangelist  has  interpreted  the 
image  as  an  allegory,  and  adds:  'But  the  days  shall  come  when  the  bride- 
groom shall  be  taken  away  from  them,  then  shall  they  fast  in  those  days? 
That  is  evidently  a  prediction  of  his  death  which  is  put  into  the  mouth  of 
Jesus,  and  which  in  this  connection  is  improbable."  Pfleiderer,  Primitive 
Christianity,  ii,  9. 


The  Gospel  35 

qualitative  difference;  it  is  the  righteousness  that  will 
stand  when  the  depths  of  the  heart  are  probed.  Legal 
morality  begins  and  ends  in  outward  action ;  that  of  Jesus 
begins  and  ends  in  the  inner  life  of  the  soul.  And  there- 
fore the  one  succeeds  just  where  the  other  fails.  It  was  the 
vain  attempt  of  legalism  to  govern  the  conduct  of  life  in 
all  its  manifold  details  and  incidents  by  rules  prescribed 
for  each  case  that  might  arise.  The  Gospel  views  life  as  a 
whole,  and  for  rules  it  substitutes  principles  which  the 
free  agent  finds  to  be  of  universal  application. 

Pharisaism  was  the  full  growth  of  the  seed  sbwn  by  the 
post-exilic  Code.1  During  the  centuries  of  Judaism  the 
ideal  of  righteousness,  the  high  aspiration  of  Israel's  early 
day,  had  dried  and  stiffened  into  a  tyranny  of  external 
law  prescribing  a  traditional  routine.  Jesus  spoke  to  the 
heart,  out  of  which  are  the  issues  of  life.  He  did  not  aim 
at  the  control  of  conduct:  ''Man,  who  made  me  a  judge 
or  a  divider  over  you?  And  he  said  to  them  all,  Take 
heed  and  beware  of  covetousness."  That  is,  he  did  not 
deal  with  conduct  because  he  dealt  with  the  springs  of 
conduct.  For  all  that  we  find  here  and  there  in  the  Old 
Scriptures  some  intimation  of  the  truth  struggling  to  find 
expression  in  prophetic  ages,  it  is  fair  to  say  that  it  was 
Jesus  who  discovered  and  revealed  the  essential  inward- 
ness of  righteousness;  nothing  could  be  less  violent,  yet 
nothing  more  revolutionary.  Law  is  concerned  only  with 
the  deed  and  disregards,  for  it  cannot  command,  the  in- 
ward disposition.  But  this  in  Jesus'  view  is  everything, 
for  it  is  this  that  gives  their  character  to  actions.  He  goes 

1 "  There  is  an  unbroken  line  of  descent  from  Ezekiel  through  the  Code  of 
the  priests  to  the  Talmud.  The  separation  of  sacred  and  profane,  the 
preference  for  the  ceremonial,  the  importance  attached  to  what  was  morally 
indifferent,  the  spirit  of  exclusiveness,  the  national  fanaticism,  were  all 
rooted  in  the  Law.  The  Law  implied  the  supremacy  of  the  Jewish  idea, 
the  petrifaction  of  true  religion,  deadly  enmity  to  the  prophetic  spirit." 
Wernle,  op.  cit.t  190. 


36  The  Gospel 

back  of  the  deed  to  motives,  purposes,  desires — back  to 
the  man:  "Thou  blind  Pharisee!  Cleanse  first  the  inside 
of  the  cup  and  platter,  that  the  outside  may  become  clean 
also."  This  is  to  look  on  conduct  as  only  a  result  and 
indication  of  a  healthy  or  unhealthy  state  of  soul,  and 
Jesus'  effort  was  to  reach  the  soul.  For  it  is  what  men 
are  that  he  cared  for,  and  not  merely  what  they  do.  If 
you  have  the  man,  you  have  the  deed ;  we  act  out  what  we 
are.  Conduct  then  is  consequential,  and  may  be  left  to 
take  care  of  itself:  "Do  men  gather  grapes  of  thorns,  or 
figs  of  thistles?  A  good  tree  cannot  bring  forth  evil  fruit, 
nor  a  corrupt  tree  good  fruit." 

This  going  back  of  conduct  to  the  man  was  just  what 
Legalism  made  impossible.  It  did  not  allow  a  man 
freedom  to  judge  for  himself,  to  order  his  own  goings;  that 
he  must  surrender  into  the  capable  hands  of  authority. 
It  assumed  that  men  are  spiritually  blind,  and  hence  at 
every  step  in  the  path  of  life  they  must  be  led  and  guided 
by  a  rule.  For  law  does  not  attempt  to  make  the  will  a 
good  will.  That  men  shall  do  right,  or  rather  not  do  wrong, 
is  the  concern  of  law;  that  they  shall  be  good  is  an  effect  it 
does  not  seek  and  cannot  secure;  it  could  not  create  good 
men  even  if  it  could  compel  good  deeds.  But  that  too  is 
beyond  it;  goodness  under  compulsion  is  not  goodness. 
If  the  agent  is  not  allowed  to  have  a  will  of  his  own,  his 
action,  as  not  really  personal,  ceases  to  be  moral.  A  moral 
act  has  significance  and  value  in  that  it  is  the  utterance, 
the  realisation  of  the  doer's  character;  but  the  works  of 
legal  righteousness  were  out  of  all  relation  to  the  character 
of  him  who  performed  them,  or  rather,  the  votary  of  the 
Law  was  not  allowed  to  possess  a  moral  character.  He 
was  nothing  other  than  a  mechanical  toy  to  be  wound  up 
and  regulated  and  set  going  through  a  round  of  prescribed 
actions  which  were  nothing  to  him,  were  not  really  his,  and 
in  themselves  were  for  the  most  part  trivial  and  meaning- 


The  Gospel  37 

less.  In  their  misguided  zeal  for  righteousness,  whose 
effect  was  to  quench  the  light  of  moral  intuition,  to  deaden 
the  conscience,  to  proscribe  the  freedom  that  makes  one 
man  and  the  manhood  that  makes  one  free,  the  Masters 
in  Israel  carried  the  principle  of  authority  in  religion  to  a 
logical  extreme  not  reached  elsewhere  in  the  history  of 
mankind.1  This  authority  Jesus  attacked  and  defied. 
He  warned  his  disciples  to  beware  of  the  "leaven  of  the 
Pharisees."  He  insisted  that  men  must  judge  of  them- 
selves what  is  right,  that  knowledge  of  right  and  wrong 
was  not  to  be  derived  at  second  hand  from  others,  but 
from  the  inner  light,  the  eye  of  the  soul.  He  proclaimed  a 
religion  of  the  spirit  more  free,  confident,  and  daring  than 
the  world  has  ever  been  willing  wholly  to  accept.2  His 
Gospel  was  the  rescue  of  enslaved  individuality;  his  word 
of  power  set  wide  the  doors  of  the  prison  house  where 
spirit  had  languished  for  centuries  in  bonds. 

Of  course  the  Jew  regarded  his  Law  as  the  declared  will 
of  God,  but  God  had  fallen  into  the  background  of  his 

1  "The  province  of  law  is  to  order  the  relations  of  men  to  one  another 
according  to  fixed  standards.  Its  object  is  not  the  individual,  but  civil 
society  as  a  whole,  and  its  application  to  individual  life  is  a  fatal  error. 
For  if  external  constraint  is  of  the  essence  of  law,  freedom  is  the  essential 
condition  of  moral  action.  To  be  moral  action  it  must  spring  from  internal 
motives;  its  regulation  by  external  standards  is  a  stifling  of  moral  life  in  its 
very  principle,"  Schurer,  The  Jewish  People  in  the  Time  of  Christ,  Div.  II. 
Vol  ii,  93-94. 

The  above,  it  will  be  seen,  is  not  quite  a  literal  quotation. 

3  "It  was  his  great  enterprise  to  transplant  his  countrymen  out  of  the 
legal  into  the  evangelic  religious  relation,  and  so  to  spiritualise  the  standard 
of  life.  And  we  hold  this  to  be,  next  to  monotheism,  the  greatest  step  ever 
taken  in  the  development  of  religious  thought;  enough,  however  imper- 
fectly apprehended,  to  account  for  all  that  followed  in  the  wake  of  his 
teaching,  for  all  the  influence  of  Christianity  upon  human  life."  Mackin- 
tosh, op.  cit.t  173. 

"The  sovereignty  of  the  Law  Jesus  destroyed  for  his  disciples.  He 
opened  up  a  new  world  to  them;  he  built  a  new  foundation  for  their  life. 
They  be  onged  not  to  the  Law  but  to  God  Himself  in  an  inner  union  which 
aid  claim  to  the  whole  man."  Weizsacker,  The  Apostolic  Age,  ii.,  343. 


38  The  Gospel 

view  and  the  Law  stood  forth  alone,  an  abstract  supreme 
authority;  according  to  the  Rabbis  God  Himself  devoted 
his  leisure  hours  on  the  Sabbath  to  its  study.  The  Gospel 
condemns  this  idolatry  of  Law.  It  is  not  a  Law  to  which 
we  owe  allegiance.  The  moral  law  is  simply  the  indicator 
of  right  and  wrong,  the  standard  and  rule  of  action — as  a 
pair  of  scales  is  an  instrument  for  measuring  weight. 
When  you  give  short  weight  to  your  neighbor,  that  is  an 
offence  against  him — not  against  the  scales.  You  owe  no 
duty  to  the  scales.  And  we  owe  no  duty  to  an  impersonal 
law.  We  cannot  speak,  except  in  metaphor,  of  the 
authority  of  a  law  or  command;  the  authority  belongs  to 
the  person  who  issues  the  command.  It  is  the  Giver  of  the 
law  to  whom  we  owe  allegiance.  Duty  is  a  personal  re- 
lation to  the  personal  God,  the  bringing  our  will  into 
accord  with  His :  ' ' Our  wills  are  ours  to  make  them  Thine." 
And  this  is  freedom,  for  the  divine  will,  or  righteousness, 
is  the  true  nature  of  will.  "Ye  shall  know  the  truth," 
said  Jesus,  "and  the  truth  shall  make  you  free."  Free- 
dom comes  with  insight  of  the  truth  that  the  law  of  Right 
is  not  an  enactment,  but  an  organic  law;  is  not  imposed 
upon  us  by  legislative  authority,  but  reveals  itself  within 
us.  Since  only  in  doing  right  the  will  is  free,  it  is  plain 
that  to  follow  righteousness  is  to  fulfil  the  law  of  our  being. 
Law,  as  obligation,  looks  beyond  itself;  its  whole  truth, 
or  outcome,  is  autonomy;  and  this  "fulfilment"  of  law, 
which  is  its  abrogation,  is  the  transcendence  or  transfigura- 
tion of  morality,  as  that  rises  from  compulsory  obedience 
to  the  free  activity  of  spirit  in  voluntary  choice,  the  free- 
dom of  self-realisation.  Jesus,  it  is  needless  to  say,  did 
not  express  himself  in  this  academic  style,  but  this  is  the 
truth  that  underlies  the  simple  language  of  his  teaching. 
This  Gospel  of  a  spiritual  righteousness,  so  familiar  to 
us  but  so  new  and  startling  to  its  first  hearers,  was  the  ful- 
filment of  Jeremiah's  prediction  of  the  new  covenant  and 


The  Gospel  39 

the  writing  of  God's  law  within  men's  hearts.1  Murder 
and  adultery  were  condemned  by  the  Law,  but  the  sin  of 
either  is  in  the  hearts  of  men, — in  the  passion  of  lust  or 
hatred  that  prompts  it.  Therefore  if  one's  hand  tempt 
him  to  offend,  let  him  cut  it  off,  or  his  eye,  let  him  pluck 
it  out,  so  that  maimed  or  blind  he  may  enter  the  Kingdom. 
Men  knew  the  old  law  of  retaliation,  but  Jesus  gives  them 
a  higher  law:  "I  say  unto  you,  Whosoever  shall  smite 
thee  on  the  one  cheek  turn  to  him  the  other  also."  The 
old  law  ran,  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbor  and  hate  thine 
enemy,  and  again  Jesus  overrides  it2:  "I  say  unto  you, 
Love  your  enemies,  bless  them  that  curse  you,  do  good  to 
them  that  hate  you,  and  pray  for  them  that  persecute  you, 
that  ye  may  be  children  of  your  Father  in  heaven,  for 
He  maketh  His  sun  to  rise  on  the  evil  and  the  good,  and 
sendeth  rain  on  the  just  and  the  unjust."  They  who 
would  injure  us  and  do  us  evil  are  none  the  less  our 
Father's  children,  and  brotherhood  demands  of  us  a  long- 
suffering  affection  like  the  Father's  own.  This  was  to 
reveal  a  law  of  love,  not  measured  by  justice  or  desert,  but 
absolute  and  universal.  It  was  to  appeal  to  human 
nature  as  susceptible  of  being  moved  by  influences 
divinely  magnanimous  and  tender,  and  at  the  same  time 
as  native  to  the  better  part  of  man  as  the  light  he  sees  by 
or  the  air  he  breathes.  And  so  comes  the  climax:  "Be 
ye  therefore  perfect  even  as  your  Father  in  heaven  is 
perfect."  That  sublime  exhortation  kindles  an  aspiration 
toward  an  infinite  ideal  that  cannot  rest  content  in  any 
righteousness  attained.  It  tells  us  we  pursue  a  flying 

1  Jeremiah,  xxx,  1-4. 

3  It  is  objected  that  the  Law  had  no  command  to  hate  the  enemy,  but 
the  "neighbor"  of  Lev.  xix,  18,  is  plainly  one  of  "the  children  thy  people." 
To  him  the  duty  of  love  was  restricted;  it  did  not  extend  to  the  stranger 
who  was  always  an  enemy  and  an  object  of  hatred  in  the  view  of  primitive 
society;  and  hence  it  appears  that  Jesus  was  justified  in  his  interpretation 
of  the  Law. 


40  The  Gospel 

goal.  The  region  of  man's  duty  cannot  be  enclosed  by 
fixed  enactments;  it  ha's  no  finite  boundary;  the  moment 
our  performance  overtakes  what  we  ought  to  do,  and  that 
demand  ceases  to  be  the  incitement  that  leads  us  on,  at 
once  a  new  one  rises  before  us  calling  us  to  follow,  and 
warning  us  never  to  suffer  any  height  they  reach  to  arrest 
our  climbing  feet. x  Human  life  is  this  strenuous  striving 
of  a  spiritual  energy, — doing  the  good  only  to  see  the 
better,  and  seeing  the  better  only  to  attempt  it,  for  "he 
who  ceases  to  become  better  ceases  to  be  good."  "So 
build  we  up  the  being  that  we  are."  Though  here  we 
cannot  reach  divine  perfection,  we  live  by  loving  it  and 
striving  toward  it,  and  because  it  transcends  our  achieve- 
ment it  secures  our  continual  endeavor,  and  shines  before 
us  as  the  image  of  that  into  which  we  are  to  grow  forever, 
the  end  for  which  man  was  created.2 

These  wonderful  words  of  Jesus  only  emphasize  the 
great  truth  involved  in  his  teaching  of  God's  Fatherhood 
which  he  was  trying  to  make  men  rise  to  and  take  in :  that 
is,  the  homogeneity  of  spirit,  the  unity  in  nature  of  God 
and  man.  His  revelation  of  God  is  one  with  his  revelation 
of  man:  each  of  these  carries  the  other  with  it.  "The 
whole  of  Jesus'  message  may  be  reduced  to  these  two 
heads — God  the  Father,  and  the  human  soul,  so  en- 
nobled that  it  can  and  does  unite  with  Him"  (Harnack). 
To  say  that  God's  Kingdom  is  within  us  comes  very  near 
to  saying  that  God  Himself  is  within  us,  and  when  we 
pray  to  Him  it  is  not  to  One  far  off  or  a  stranger;  it  is  our 
higher  nature  in  its  weakness  communing  with  our  higher 

1 "  I  count  not  myself  to  have  apprehended,  but  one  thing  I  do :  forgetting 
the  things  which  are  behind  and  stretching  forward  to  the  things  which  are 
before,  I  press  on  toward  the  goal,  unto  the  prize  of  the  upward  calling  of 
God  in  Christ  Jesus." 

3  That  aspiration  rather  than  achievement  is  the  measure  of  the  ex- 
cellence that  is  distinctively  human  is  an  idea  that  finds  reiterated  expres- 
sion in  Browning's  poetry,  as  all  his  readers  know. 


The  Gospel  41 

nature  in  its  perfect  strength.  And  so  when  Jesus  tells 
the  people  not  to  worry  over  meat  and  drink  and  raiment, 
but  trust  the  Father  who  knows  their  needs,  it  is  that 
they  shall  give  themselves  to  one  thing  only:  "Seek  ye 
first  the  Kingdom  of  God  and  His  righteousness."  Seek 
God's  righteousness:  here  we  have  in  its  full  meaning  the 
righteousness  that  exceeds  that  of  the  Pharisees.  A 
goodness  of  one's  own,  inward,  free,  spontaneous — a 
goodness  the  same  in  kind  as  God's,  however  infinitesimal 
in  degree,  that  is  the  latent  capacity  of  the  divine  life  in 
the  souls  of  God's  children.  This  capacity  Jesus  appealed 
to.  What  he  aimed  at  was  the  birth  of  the  spiritual  man 
in  the  man  of  sense.  It  was  spiritual  life  in  its  free  activ- 
ity that  he  sought  to  call  into  being. 

And  so  what  he  had  to  do  was  not  merely  to  teach  men 
but  to  inspire  them.  And  his  teaching  in  itself  was  in- 
spiration. x  The  friends  of  Jesus  are  called  his  disciples, 
but  he  was  not  properly  a  teacher.  He  had  no  theological 
doctrine  to  impart ;  he  was  not  regarded  as  a  Scribe,  more 
enlightened  than  the  others.  He  was  concerned  with 
facts  rather  than  theories,  with  life  rather  than  thought, 
and  he  spoke  not  so  directly  to  the  intelligence  as  to  the 
conscience  and  the  heart.  His  constant  aim  was  to 
create  a  new  religious  life  in  the  souls  of  his  followers,  to 
inspire  them  with  his  own  faith,  with  the  light  of  his  own 
consciousness  and  the  spirit  of  his  own  inner  life.  He  told 
the  method  of  his  teaching  in  a  parable.  He  was  the  sower 
who  went  forth  to  scatter  his  seed,  as  it  were  blindly  but 
with  full  hands,  alike  on  the  trodden  way,  in  rocky  places, 
among  thorns  and  on  fertile  soil.  If  much  were  wasted, 
still  the  sowing  would  not  be  without  effect.  We  should 

1 1  need  not  dwell  upon  the  inimitable  charm  of  its  simplicity  and  beauty, 
its  vivid  and  illuminating  play  of  fancy,  the  variety  of  tone  adapting  itself 
to  varying  occasions  and  the  differences  in  men,  for  all  this  many  eloquent 
writers  have  impressed  upon  us. 


42  The  Gospel 

note  the  exactness  of  the  figure.  All  Jesus'  teaching  was 
seminal;  it  was  suggestive  rather  than  didactic,  it  pointed 
out  the  direction  in  which  the  disciple  was  to  find  his  own 
way.  All  his  sayings  were  left  open,  free,  and  fluent  for 
the  hearers  to  grasp  and  to  interpret.  And  none  so 
abounds  in  metaphor,  hyperbole,  and  paradox,  for  his 
terse  and  pregnant  utterances  are  framed  to  seize  the 
attention  and  set  men  thinking,  to  open  their  eyes  to 
truth,  to  rouse  the  sleeping  conscience  and  pierce  the 
hardened  heart.  They  are  not  imposed  on  his  hearers, 
they  appeal  to  them;  "He  that  hath  ears  to  hear,  let  him 
hear."  They  do  not  lay  down  a  new  law,  but  seek  to 
waken  the  life  which  no  law  can  give.  They  are  not  to  be 
taken  in  the  letter — of  that  the  speaker  often  seems  care- 
less. Literalists  who  mistake  this  teaching  for  a  code  of 
practice  tell  us  it  is  impracticable  and  of  little  value  for 
modern  life.  But  it  is  owing  to  this  teaching  that  modern 
life  is  what  it  is.  All  that  is  best  in  it  is  the  development 
of  what  Jesus  gave  the  world  in  germ ;  the  vital  principles 
he  sowed  broadcast  have  borne  fruit  a  hundredfold,  and 
the  moral  world  we  live  in  is  his  work.  For  his  sayings 
were  planted  so  deeply  in  the  hearts  of  men.  that  they  fixed 
themselves  there  as  seeds  of  life,  and  thorns  that  have 
grown  up  with  them  have  not  choked  them.  Their  definite 
gnomic  expression  the  ingenuity  or  dulness  of  theologians 
has  never  been  able  wholly  to  obscure,  and  under  all  the 
weight  of  misconception  and  perversion,  of  contradictory 
teachings,  which  the  ages  have  piled  upon  them,  they 
have  remained  a  permanent  regenerative  power— like 
the  wheat  found  in  Egyptian  tombs  which  still  retains 
undiminished  the  capacity  of  germination  wherever  it 
falls  upon  good  ground. * 

1  Auguste  Sabatier  writes  thus  of  Jesus'  teaching:  "II  ne  sert  que  d'  im- 
ages, de  jeux  de  mots,  de  paradoxes,  de  paraboles,  de  toute  forme  d'  ex- 
pression qui  prise  a  la  lettre  est  bien  la  plus  inadequate  du  monde,  mais 


The  Gospel  43 

The  world  has  known  many  teachers  of  ethics,  but 
Jesus  is  not  one  of  them.  Ethics  may  be  called  the  science 
of  life ;  one  who  is  instructed  in  ethics  knows  how  he  ought 
to  live.  Such  knowledge  is  not  difficult  to  acquire,  but 
it  is  not  very  valuable.  "The  object  of  systems  of 
morality,"  said  Matthew  Arnold,  "is  to  take  possession 
of  human  life  and  to  establish  it  in  the  practice  of  virtue 
by  prescribing  to  it  fixed  principles  of  action,  fixed  rules 
of  conduct.  Thus  human  life  has  always  a  clue  to  follow 
and  may  always  be  making  way  toward  its  goal."  If  only 
the  matter  were  as  simple  as  that!  Human  life  has 
scarcely  justified  this  innocent  confidence  in  rules  and 
regulations.  Portia  is  a  better  moralist:  "If  to  do  were 
as  easy  as  to  know  what  were  good  to  do,  chapels  had  been 
churches  and  poor  men's  cottages  princes'  palaces.  I  can 
easier  tell  twenty  what  were  good  to  be  done  than  be  one 
of  the  twenty  to  follow  mine  own  teaching."  The  truth 
is,  life,  as  an  affair  of  practice,  is  rather  an  art  than  a 
science,  and  in  all  art  the  first  thing  is  power — power  of 
soul.  It  is  the. energy  of  creative  genius,  and  not  careful 
adherence  to  fixed  rules,  that  lifts  art  work  above  medioc- 
rity. It  is  tha  same  with  the  art  of  living.  And  so  even 
if  prescribing  a  rule  were  enough  to  secure  its  control  of 

qui  est  en  revanche  la  plus  vivante  el  la  plus  excitatrice.  Chacune  de  ses 
sentences  est  comme  revenue  d'une  e"corce  rude;  c'est  une  noix  qu'il  faut 
casser.  J£sus  voulait  forcer  ses  auditeurs  a  interpreter  ses  paroles  parce 
qu'il  les  appelait  a  une  activite*  autonome  et  personelle.  Encore  aujourdhui 
celui  qui  ne  se  livre  pas  a  ce  travail  d'assimilation  et  d'interpre"tation  en 
lisant  1'Evangile,  celui  qui  ne  perce  pas  a  travers  Jes  paroles  jusqu'  a  Tame, 
et  de  la  lettre  ne  remonte  pas  jusqu'  &  la  conscience  intime  du  Mattre,  ne 
saurait  comprendre  son  enseignement  ni  en  profiter." 

And  this  may  be  added  from  Albert  ReVille: 

"  Comme  charactere  ge'ne'rale  de  sa  doctrine  elle  est  surtout  remarquable 
par  son  principe  et  par  sa  tendance.  Elle  n'est  pas  une  chose  arre"t6e 
ste"reotype*e,  elle  se  fait,  elle  devient.  Elle  part  du  Judaisme,  le  nie  parfois 
formellement,  le  modifie  souvent  indirectement,  le  de"passe  toujours.  Le 
point  de  depart  est  fixe,  la  tendance  constante,  le  point  d'arrive'e  visible, 
bien  qu'il  ne  soit  pas  toujours  6nonceY' 


44  The  Gospel 

conduct,  that  would  not  mend  the  matter.  There  are 
many  to  whom  the  morality  of  custom  is  not  grievous; 
they  find  it  not  too  difficult  to  live  by  the  conventional 
rule,  to  conform  to  the  proprieties;  they  are  satisfied  to  be 
respectable  and  to  escape  the  responsibility  of  personal 
action  by  going  with  the  crowd.  The  average  man  is 
disposed  to  follow  precedent,  to  recognize  existing  stand- 
ards of  judgment,  to  adopt  the  prevalent  opinions,  to 
imbibe  the  prejudices  that  the  world  calls  principles — in  a 
word  to  live  in  accordance  with  the  views  and  sentiments 
that  acquire  the  sanction  of  society  because  they  are  those 
of  average  men.  The  trouble  is,  this  is  not  really  living 
at  all.  Life  means  spontaneous  initiative,  and  it  is  this 
that  distinguishes  vitality  from  mechanism.1 

Jewish  society  in  the  time  of  Jesus  was  the  most  finished 
conventionalism  the  world  has  seen,  even  in  the  un- 
changing East,  where  custom  and  tradition  are  invested 
with  a  binding  sacredness.  Men  were  bound  down  and 
hedged  in  on  every  side.  They  "moved  in  orbits  calcu- 
lated before  they  were  born."  It  was  all  arranged  in 
minutest  detail  how  they  were  to  live — to  think  and 
speak  and  feast  and  marry  and  fast  and  'pray.  Subser- 
vience to  the  conventional  uniformity  lay  with  leaden 
weight  on  the  heart  of  the  people,  and  suppressed  in  the 
individual  all  that  was  distinctively  his  own.  This  it 
was  that  Jesus  sought  to  rescue,  the  separate  personal 
being  of  each  man.  He  spoke  direct  to  the  individual 
soul,  roused  it  from  its  inertia,  drew  it  out,  as  it  were, 
from  the  mass  of  men  in  which  it  was  swallowed  up  and 
lost,  and  taught  it  a  sense  of  its  own  infinite  independence 
through  its  own  direct  dependence  upon  God.  He  held 
to  a  belief  in  the  inherent  ability  of  men  to  respond  to 
appeals  to  the  heart  and  conscience.  He  trusted  all  to  the 

1  "If  there  had  been  a  law  which  could  have  given  life,  verily  righteous- 
ness would  have  been  by  the  law." 


The  Gospel  45 

better  part  of  man  and  its  native  affinity  with  the  right 
and  true.    When  he  commends  the  "faith"  of  those  who 
welcome  his  preaching,  what  he  means  by  that  is  a  union 
of  mental  candor  and  moral  simplicity;  not  an  unreasoning 
credulity,  but  that  openness  of  mind,  freedom  from  pre- 
judice, and  readiness  to  receive  new  truth  which  are 
qualities  essentially  reasonable.     And  he  urged  men  to 
use  their  power  of  discrimination  between  false  and  true, 
right  and  wrong,  and  they  would  find  the  power  grow  by 
use,  as  it  is  lost  by  disuse  (Mark  iv.,  23-25).    His  hearers 
learned  for  the  first  time  that  they  had  faculties  and  re- 
sponsibilities of  their  own.     Jesus'  object  too,  like  that  of 
the  systems  of  morality,  was  to  "take  possession  of  human 
life,"  but  it  was  not  by  prescribing  rules  that  he  en- 
deavored to  attain  it.1     His  way  was  to  inspire,  rouse, 
energise,  transform,  the  individual  soul.     ' '  I  am  come  that 
they  may  have  life,"  he  said,  "and  have  it  more  abun- 
dantly."    The  follower  of  Jesus  was  to  be  a  real  man  and 
not  a  marionette,  was  to  live  his  own  life  and  not  be  de- 
pendent on  the  movement  of  the  social  mechanism.     And 
to  live  abundantly  means  the  full  activity  of  the  personal 
energies,  the  quickened  intensity  of  the  higher  powers  of 
the  soul. 

To  this  abundance  of  life  Jesus  would  commit  its 
guidance.  The  aim  of  his  positive  morality  was  not  so 
much  the  suppression  of  the  lower  nature  as  the  lifting 
of  the  higher  nature  into  fellowship  with  the  eternal 
Goodness,  and  therefore  he  baptised  with  fire.  The 
Stoic  called  on  reason  to  suppress  the  passions  that  he 
feared  and  shunned ;  his  ideal  was  a  passionless  tranquillity. 
Yet  passion — eager,  ardent  desire — is  the  one  great 
motive  power;  without  passion,  it  has  been  said,  nothing 
great  was  ever  done  on  earth.  Jesus  trusted  all  to  this 

1  "Walk  in  the  spirit  and  ye  shall  not  fulfil  the  lust  of  the  flesh.  .  .  . 
But  if  ye  are  led  by  the  spirit  ye  are  not  under  the  law." 


46  The  Gospel 

ardor  of  the  soul.  He  sought  to  overcome  the  evil 
passions  of  men  by  rousing  a  more  powerful  passion  which 
should  make  his  followers  enthusiasts  for  goodness: 
"When  a  strong  man  armed  keepeth  his  palace  his  goods 
are  in  peace;  but  when  a  stronger  than  he  shall  come  upon 
him  and  overcome  him,  he  taketh  from  him  all  his  armor 
wherein  he  trusted  and  divideth  his  spoils."  The  prin- 
ciple of  inward  righteousness  lays  all  stress  upon  the 
motive  of  the  deed  and  the  disposition  of  the  doer.  If 
then  it  be  asked,  what  shall  be  the  one  all-ruling  motive 
of  human  conduct,  and  what  the  constant  disposition  of 
the  soul,  obviously  the  answer  is,  it  is  love  to  God  and  to 
man.  Ages  of  oppression  had  taught  the  Jews  to  hate  all 
Gentiles:  the  Romans  found  their  salient  characteristic 
to  be  their  "hatred  of  the  human  race."  No  chains  can 
bind  and  subdue  that  strong  passion;  it  must  be  driven 
out  by  a  stronger  than  itself  that  enters  as  a  conqueror 
the  palace  of  the  soul.  Therefore,  "I  say  unto  you:  Love 
your  enemies !  "  For  love  is  a  mighty  power,  like  the  faith 
that  removes  mountains,  and  with  love  as  with  God  all 
things  are  possible. 

Gentiles  and  Samaritans  were  not  the  only  objects  of 
the  Jew's  hatred;  it  was  part  of  his  religious  duty  to  hate 
and  despise  the  lawless,  loose-living  "people  of  the  land" 
('Am  ha'  arets).  It  was  a  leading  note  of  Jewish  piety 
to  hold  oneself  carefully  aloof  from  sinners.  Legal  purity 
could  only  maintain  itself  by  avoidance  of  all  contami- 
nating intercourse  with  people  of  vicious  life,  or  with  the 
publicans,  the  excommunicated,  the  ceremonially  unclean. 
In  the  eyes  of  the  Pharisees  the  mass  of  the  people,  un- 
schooled in  the  Law,  were  under  a  curse.  A  knowledge 
of  all  the  minute  rules  and  ordinances  of  the  Law,  with  its 
613  precepts  and  prohibitions,  and  those  of  the  Tradition 
still  more  numerous,  was  the  pride  of  these  trained  virtu- 
osos of  piety,  but  such  a  knowledge  was  not  attainable  by 


The  Gospel  47 

the  average  man,  with  his  living  to  make,  and  still  less  an 
accurate  performance  of  all  that  was  required;  and  so, 
shunned  and  banned  by  the  pious,  the  "sinners"  were  left 
to  shift  for  themselves  in  body  and  soul,  and  such  is  the 
demoralising  effect  of  social  condemnation  that  it  is  likely 
many  of  these  constructive  sinners  were  actually  nothing 
less.  The  quick  sympathy  of  Jesus  was  touched  by  the 
forlorn  condition  of  this  outcast  populace.  "When  he 
saw  the  multitude  he  was  moved  with  compassion  for 
them  because  they  were  distressed  and  wandering,  as 
sheep  not  having  a  shepherd. ' '  At  sight  of  this  maltreated 
and  leaderless  mass  he  felt  the  call  of  the  old  prophet  to 
preach  good  tidings  to  the  poor,  to  bind  up  the  broken- 
hearted, to  set  at  liberty  those  that  were  bound  (Luke 
iv,  1 6  seq.).  He  sought  men  everywhere,  in  the  synagogue 
on  the  Sabbath,  and  at  their  work  on  weekdays.  He 
invited  their  confidence,  he  entered  their  houses,  he  sat 
by  the  bedside  of  the  sick  and  at  the  table  of  the  publican. 
He  wanted  to  bring  these  people  to  God,  not  to  the  dim 
view  of  a  King  magnificently  distant,  but  to  the  presence 
of  a  Father  close  at  hand  in  every  hour  of  their  daily  life. 
Good  or  bad,  these  men  and  women  were  his  brothers  and 
sisters.  If  the  sinners  despaired  of  themselves  they 
should  see  that  he  had  faith  in  them ;  if  they  had  lost  their 
self-respect  he  would  give  it  back  to  them  by  his  readiness 
to  meet  them  on  equal  terms;  if  they  were  sullen,  hard, 
embittered,  he  would  go  to  them  as  a  friend  and  by  his 
frank  kindliness  win  them  to  a  better  mood.1  Nothing 
was  nearer  to  his  heart  than  this  ministry  of  redemption. 
When  the  Baptist  sent  from  his  prison  to  ask,  Art  thou 

1  "His  sense  of  the  worth  of  every  human  personality,  his  tender  treat- 
ment of  the  bruised  and  wounded  spirit,  his  delicacy  in  dealing  with  the 
tattered  fragments  of  humanity,  his  reverence  in  the  devastated  shrine, 
characterised  the  spirit  that  is  needed  to  lift  mankind  again."  Schmidt, 
The  Prophet  of  Nazareth,  381. 


48  The  Gospel 

he  that  should  come,  or  look  we  for  another?  he  told 
the  messengers  to  report  what  they  had  seen  and  heard 
of  him,  and  how  the  prophecy  was  fulfilled  (Isaiah  xxxv, 
5-6)  and  now  the  spiritually  blind  gained  vision  of  the 
Divine,  the  deaf  were  brought  to  hear  the  voice  of  God 
and  the  dumb  to  speak  His  praise,  the  lame  found  strength 
to  walk  in  the  path  of  righteousness,  the  moral  lepers  were 
cleansed,  the  dead  in  sin  were  raised  to  new  life,  and  the 
poor  had  the  good  tidings  preached  to  them.  And  happy 
is  he,  added  Jesus,  who  does  not  take  offense  in  me. x  That 
happiness  was  not  for  the  Pharisees.  They  were  frankly 
shocked  at  the  behavior  of  the  friend  of  sinners,  the  solici- 
tude and  sympathy  he  showed  for  the  profligate  and 
outcast;  and  we  can  imagine  their  horror  when  later  in 
Jerusalem  he  faced  them  with  the  bold  words :  "I  say  unto 
you,  the  publicans  and  harlots  go  into  the  Kingdom  of 
God  before'you."  He  met  their  protest  with  his  parables 
of  the  Tares  and  the  Dragnet,  declaring  that  the  separa- 
tion of  the  wicked  from  the  righteous  was  not  man's  work 
but  God's.2  To  their  murmurs  at  his  scandalous  inti- 
macy with  the  reprobate  he  replied:  "They  that  be  whole 
need  not  a  physician,  but  they  that  are  sick."  Above 
all  he  held  up  to  them  in  more  than  one  touching  picture 
the  eagerness  of  the  Divine  Heart  to  reclaim  the  sinner 
and  forgive  his  sin.  So  far  as  these  parables  were  ad- 
dressed to  Pharisees  Jesus  was  casting  pearls  before  swine, 
and  they  were  quick  to  trample  them  under  foot  and  turn 

1  The  faith-cures  of  Jesus  were  merely  an  incident  of  his  ministry  whose 
importance  has  been  immensely  exaggerated,  as  their  character  has  been 
transformed  by  the  passion  for  the  marvellous  which  prevailed  in  his  day. 
It  is  plain  that  he  strove  to  minimise  the  effect  of  these  works  of  healing  on 
the  popular  mind,  for  they  diverted  attention  from  his  real  work,  his 
preaching  the  Gospel  of  the  spiritual  life. 

2  In  after  days  these  parables  were  taken  to  refer  to  the  Kingdom  of  God, 
for  this  had  become  identified  with  the  Church.    But  the  presence  of  the 
wicked  in  the  Kingdom  of  God  is  in  direct  contradiction  with  Jesus'  idea 
of  it  as  essentially  a  Kingdom  of  spiritual  goodness. 


The  Gospel  49 

and  rend  him;  but  the  truth  they  tell  is  the  one  sinners 
need  first  to  know.  The  Jewish  terror  of  sin  had  become 
a  haunting,  paralysing  nightmare;  we  know  how  it 
weighed  on  the  heart  of  Paul.  Jesus  lifted  this  burden 
from  the  souls  of  men  by  his  revelation  of  the  heavenly 
Father's  love;  this  was  to  place  the  relation  of  sinful  man 
to  God,  not  upon  a  new  footing,  but  in  a  new  light.  And 
if  sinners  were  to  come  to  that  light,  come  to  feel  the 
unchanging  love  of  God  which  is  His  very  nature,  it  must 
first  be  shown  them  as  forgiveness,  blotting  out  as  a  cloud 
their  transgressions  for  His  names'  sake.  The  cloud  in- 
tercepts the  sunlight  till  it  is  pierced  and  scattered  by  the 
sun.  Sin  is  estrangement  from  God,  and  His  forgiveness 
is  reunion.  A  child  disobeys  his  father:  he  feels  that 
he  has  done  wrong,  that  the  wrong  has  somehow  separated 
him  from  his  father,  and  in  that  sense  of  separation  he  is 
troubled,  restless,  unhappy.  He  knows  in  a  general  way 
that  his  father  is  good  and  kind;  what  he  needs  to  know  is 
that  his  father  is  ready  and  anxious  to  forgive  him  as  soon 
as  he  can — as  soon  as  the  child  will  let  himself  be  forgiven. 
And  this  is  the  message  of  Jesus.  God  is  our  Father,  and 
whenever  we  do  wrong,  if  we  are  sorry  for  it  and  tell  him 
so,  He  will  always  forgive  us,  as  any  father  forgives  his 
child.  This  forgiveness  does  not  relate  to^penalty;  it  is 
the  remission  of  sin,  the  cleansing  us  from  our  unrighteous- 
ness. It  breaks  down  the  barrier  of  guilt  which  has  shut 
us  out  from  God  and  shut  us  in  to  our  self-reproach  and 
fear,  and  brings  us  back  to  the  cordial  union  with  the 
Father  which  is  the  peace  that  passeth  understanding. 
And,  as  Jesus  tells  us  in  his  story  of  a  father  and  a  son,  the 
ground  of  the  Divine  forgiveness  is  the  Divine  Fatherhood 
— a  Fatherhood  that  goes  deeper  than  our  sin.  The  sinful 
soul  is  still  the  soul  of  the  Father's  child.  Nothing  a  man 
does  can  annul  the  relation  in  which  he  has  his  being.  He 
can  make  himself  a  bad  son;  he  cannot  unmake  his  son- 

4 


50  The  Gospel 

ship.  And  though  we  lose  at  times  our  hold  upon  this 
truth,  God  never  does,  and  always  if  we  will  our  way  is 
open  to  return  to  Him.  For  His  forgiveness  is  nothing  else 
than  his  constant  readiness  to  welcome  all  true  repentance, 
and  hence  it  is  given  freely  and  without  condition.  Jesus 
tells  us,  with  that  accent  of  certainty  and  confidence  which 
stamps  all  his  utterances,  that  God's  love  is  free  to  us  as 
the  common  air  we  breathe,  and  firm  as  the  earth  we  walk 
upon.  This  forgiving  love  is  not  something  called  into 
being  by  any  act  of  ours,  or  of  any  other  in  our  behalf;  it  is 
now  and  has  been  always  original,  primordial  in  the  rela- 
tion of  God  with  man.  Deeper  than  our  sins,  more 
ancient  than  our  being,  love  is  the  very  nature  of  God 
Himself  and  guaranteed  by  the  divine  immutability. 
That  our  heavenly  Father's  forgiveness  is  to  be  had  for  the 
asking,  that  there  is  joy  in  heaven  over  one  sinner  that 
repenteth,  that  God  Himself  is  our  Saviour,  unweariedly 
seeking  his  lost  child  until  He  finds  him — this  is  what  we 
read  in  the  beautiful  fifteenth  chapter  of  St.  Luke.  And 
I  cannot  but  think  that  one  day  posterity  will  marvel  that 
in  this  vital  matter  so  many  generations  of  divines  have 
taught  persistently  that  other  "gospel"  of  St.  Paul  which 
rejects  and  contradicts  this  teaching  of  Jesus,  so  simple, 
so  profound,  and  so  exhaustive. 

This,  I  say,  is  the  first  thing  the  sinner  needs  to  know, 
that  the  overcoming  of  sin  brings  its  eflacement,  or  for- 
giveness, that  sin  renounced  is  sin  abolished,  that  when  a 
man  repents  and  forsakes  his  sin  it  is  as  though  it  had  not 
been.  The  past  then  cannot  claim  us,  cannot  bind  us  in 
its  fetters.  With  this  comes  relief  from  the  paralysing 
depression  that  weighs  upon  the  heart.  If  we  will  break 
with  our  past,  will  turn  from  evil  to  good,  nothing  stands 
in  our  way.  For  sin  only  exists  within  us  by  our  acquies- 
cence, and  the  sole  obstacle  to  our  deliverance  lies  wholly 
in  ourselves — not  in  God,  who  is  "faithful  and  just"  to 


The  Gospel  51 

blot  out  the  sin  we  cast  off  and  leave  behind  us.  That  is 
all  we  have  to  do,  break  free  from  the  sin  that  holds  us, 
and  the  way  is  clear  for  a  daily  renewal  of  our  lives. 

Let  us  turn  for  a  moment  to  another  aspect  of  forgive- 
ness, another  truth  concerning  it,  which  may  be  found  in 
the  story  of  the  healing  of  the  paralytic  in  Mark  ii, 
though  it  is  apt  to  escape  notice.  Jesus  said  to  the  sick 
of  the  palsy:  "Son,  thy  sins  are  forgiven,"  and  when  the 
Scribes  protested,  "who  can  forgive  sins  but  God  only," 
he  offered  them  the  evidence  of  the  marvellous  cure,  "that 
ye  may  know  that  the  Son  of  Man  hath  power  on  earth 
to  forgive  sins."  Pfleiderer  has  this  comment  on  these 
words1: 

The  Son  of  Man  here  signifies  no  more  than  Man:  it  is  the 
literal  translation  of  the  Aramaic  barnasha,  the  standing  ex- 
pression for  "Man";  and  herein  lies  the  point  of  Jesus' words, 
namely,  that  forgiveness  of  sins  takes  place  not  only  at  God's 
throne  of  judgment  in  heaven,  as  the  Jews  supposed,  but  that 
man  on  earth  is  authorized  to  manifest  the  divine  will  of  love 
not  only  in  healing  sickness,  but  also  in  the  forgiveness  of  sins. 
A  reference  to  the  Messiah  would  only  obscure  the  significant 
force  of  this  saying,  and  would  besides  have  been  quite  un- 
intelligible to  his  opponents ;  that  on  the  other  hand  the  saying 
was  understood  by  his  hearers  with  reference  to  man  in  general 
is  shown  by  the  conclusion  of  the  narrative  in  Matt,  ix,  8: 
"They  praised  God  who  had  given  such  power  unto  men." 

To  refer  Jesus'  declaration  to  the  Christian  Messiah,  the 
Divine  Christ,  would  not  only  obscure  but  destroy  its 
significance.  To  hold  the  speaker  divine  is  to  agree  with 
the  Scribes,  to  admit  that  it  was  an  altogether  superhuman 
power  that  he  claimed;  and  it  is  just  this  that  Jesus  denies. 
The  power  to  forgive  sin,  he  tells  us,  in  one  inherent  in 
humanity.  We  all  know  the  occult  force  of  personality, 

1  Primitive  Christianity,  ii,  8. 


52  The  Gospel 

the  influence  of  one  strong  human  soul  upon  another  to 
brace  and  quicken  the  energy  of  will;  we  know  how  one 
can  turn  a  brother  from  his  evil  way  and  bring  him  back 
to  goodness,  can  redeem  him  from  the  power  of  sin  and 
renew  a  right  spirit  within  him.  And  this  is  to  assure 
him  that  he  is  forgiven.1  It  is  for  us  to  cultivate  and 
exercise  it  that  this  power  is  given  unto  men ;  it  is  the  key 
that  opens  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  to  the  sinner.  Such 
changes  came  with  time  and  the  pristine  inspiration  so 
waned  and  weakened,  that  the  remission  of  sin  degenerated 
into  a  sacerdotal  rite;  but  to  wash  away  a  brother's  evil 
past,  to  uplift  the  fallen  and  set  their  feet  in  the  path  of 
right,  everyone  is  a  priest.  "The  works  that  I  do  ye 
shall  do  also,"  was  Jesus'  saying,  and  it  means  above  all 
that  we  have  our  part  to  do  in  taking  away  the  sin  of  the 
world.  Let  a  man  have  something  of  his  spirit,  his  key 
to  the  sinner's  heart,  the  love  of  man  which  is  one  with 
faith  and  hope  in  man,  and  he  will  hear  a  call  to  go  forth 
with  a  brother's  heart  and  a  brother's  hand  to  seek  and 
save  the  lost.  In  the  early  days  when  the  words  of  Jesus 
were  warm  and  living  in  men's  hearts,  we  read  of  their 
confessing  their  sins  one  to  another  and  forgiving  one 
another  as  God  had  forgiven  them.  And  this  is  the 
meaning  of  that  acted  parable  in  the  fourth  gospel,  their 
master's  washing  of  the  disciples'  feet.  It  has  been  taken 
for  a  teaching  of  humility,  but  consider  in  what  a  solemn 
and  impressive  way  the  incident  is  introduced  and  what 
deep  import  is  assigned  to  it  (John  xiii,  i-io).  "Having 
loved  his  own  which  were  in  the  world,  he  loved  them 

1  "Jesus  affirms  that  man  has  the  power  to  pardon  sins.  This  thought 
finds  expression  again  when  he  enjoins  upon  his  disciples  to  exercise  this 
authority,  this  blessed  privilege  of  assuring  their  fellow-men  of  the  pardon 
of  their  sins,  when  their  disposition  should  justify  them  in  doing  so.  (Matt, 
xviii,  1 8).  This  simple  assurance  of  forgiveness,  flowing  from  a  living  faith 
in  a  heavenly  Father's  love,  was  to  Jesus  no  sacerdotal  act.  Any  man  had  a 
right  to  do  it."  Schmidt,  op.  cit.t  107. 


The  Gospel  53 

unto  the  end.  ...  If  I  wash  thee  not  thou  hast  no  part 
with  me";  and  then,  "he  that  is  bathed  needeth  not  save 
to  wash  his  feet, " — which  will  be  soiled  as  he  comes  from 
the  bath.  The  forgiving  love  of  God  cleanses  the  penitent 
from  sin,  but  when  he  steps  forth  from  that  bath  upon  the 
dusty  floors  of  the  house  of  life  he  will  need  to  seek  for- 
giveness again  and  again  for  the  faults  and  failings  that 
human  weakness  cannot  escape.  Then  follows  the  con- 
cluding admonition:  "If  I,  your  lord  and  master,  have 
washed  your  feet,  ye  also  ought  to  wash  one  another's  feet ; 
for  I  have  given  you  an  example  that  ye  should  do  as  I 
have  done  to  you.  If  ye  know  these  things,  happy  are  ye 
if  ye  do  them." 

To  return  from  this  digression:  Taken  rightly,  as  pre- 
cedent condition  of  our  own  exertions,  belief  in  divine 
forgiveness  is  part  of  our  moral  education ;  it  brings  heart 
and  hope  to  the  climbers  on  the  rugged  upward  path. 
For  this  is  the  next  thing  we  have  to  tell  the  sinner,  that 
while  the  infinite  placability  of  God  removes  all  obstruc- 
tion in  man's  way  to  a  better  life,  He  leaves  ,the  attainment 
of  it  in  man's  own  hand.  Deliverance  from  evil  is  a 
process  of  self-extrication,  of  self -redemption.  Jesus  tells 
the  moral  paralytic  his  sins  are  forgiven,  and  then  bids 
him  arise  and  walk.  Eternal  life  is  not  given  to  us,  but 
gained  by  us  through  constancy  in  effort.  "By  your 
endurance,"  said  Jesus,  "ye  shall  win  for  yourselves 
souls."  That  is,  souls  are  not  something  ready  made,  but 
something  we  make  for  ourselves;  spirit  is  a  self-creation. 
And  that  creation  is  through  self-conquest,  for  our  Self  is 
a  self -opposed.  We  do  not  live  long  without  learning  that 
the  soul  is  a  scene  of  conflict  between  good  and  evil  powers, 
and  that  the  one  work  of  life  is  to  establish  that  complete 
dominion  of  the  higher  over  the  lower  self  which  is  the 
freedom  of  the  spirit.  For  we  cannot  recognise  the 
presence  in  us  of  a  higher  nature,  in  germ  akin  to  the  divine, 


54  The  Gospel 

without  recognising  also  the  obligation  that  lies  upon  us  to 
make  it  dominate  our  life.  To  do  this,  to  renounce  one's 
lower  nature  and  his  wilful  will,  to  rise  on  stepping  stones 
of  one's  dead  self  to  higher  things — that  is  the  labor  and 
the  difficulty;  for  might  is  not  with  the  right,  and  in  most 
of  us  the  lower  nature  is  the  stronger.  And  yet  the 
consciousness  of  obligation  implies  a  power  to  realise  the 
ideal.  To  this  Jesus  appeals;  his  call  comes  to  our  help, 
waking  the  soul  to  new  life  and  rousing  it  to  action. 
"Repent,  for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  at  hand":  that  is 
not  a  call  to  an  idle  contrition  that  sits  in  sackcloth  and 
ashes,  but  to  a  radical  change  in  the  whole  inner  man. 
Turn  to  God  and  the  good  with  your  whole  heart  and  the 
massed  energy  of  an  undivided  will;  change,  amend  your 
.life,  it  cries,  for  you  can  if  you  will;  this  metanoia  is  within 
your  power.  It  is  an  utterance  of  despair  that  "men  do 
not  change,  they  only  develop,"  but  in  truth  it  is  only  in 
that  they  can  change  that  men  are  men.  The  lower 
creatures  develop  under  the  action  of  natural  laws  to 
which  they  are  subject,  but  that  "man  is  man  and  master 
of  his  fate" — is  man  because  he  is  master  of  his  fate — is 
the  witness  of  the  inmost  consciousness.  Self-mastery 
gained  through  a  stern  self-discipline  we  recognise  as  an 
obligation,  and  hence  however  difficult  it  is  always 
possible.  This  great  Gospel  word,  metanoia,  is  an  appeal 
to  the  strong,  an  inspiration  of  strength  to  the  weak.  In 
the  eyes  of  Jesus  the  best  that  we  can  be  is  what  we  really 
are.  When  he  speaks  of  sinners  as  the  sick  he  tells  us  that 
our  health,  our  normal  state,  is  goodness;  he  tells  us  that 
man  is  not  naturally  bad  but  naturally  good,  since  not  the 
' '  brute  inheritance, ' '  but  that  which  makes  him  son  of 
God  is  his  true  nature.  It  is  not  that,  in  itself  evil,  his 
nature  needs  to  be  transformed;  rather  what  it  needs  is 
education,  or  drawing  forth — to  come  to  itself. x  If  it  be 

1  This  was  clearly  seen  by  Condorcet  who  clung  to  his  faith  in  the  Per- 


The  Gospel  55 

otherwise  there  is  no  such  thing  as  sin.  If  the  man  who 
lives  in  sin  is  living  according  to  his  nature,  then  he  is  no 
longer  a  sinner.  He  stands  on  the  level  of  the  brute  which 
cannot  sin;  for  he  is  but  what  his  nature  makes  him,  and 
he  cannot  be  blamed  for  that.  Hence  it  is  only  the  fact 
that  man  is  by  nature  righteous  that  makes  his  wrong- 
doing sinful.  It  may  indeed  be  left  to  "fools"  to  "mock 
at  sin,"  and  yet  too  much  has  been  made  of  it  in  past 
days;  the  Glad  Tidings  of  Jesus  has  been  sicklied  o'er  by 
the  morbid  conscience  of  Christendom.  To  treat  sin  as  an 
organic  element  of  human  nature  is  the  long  error  of  the 
past  which  has  poisoned  the  springs  of  Christian  thought. 
We  should  know  that  only  goodness  has  a  substantial 
character  and  an  abiding  life;  evil  is  in  its  nature  a  nega- 
tive, as  darkness  is  the  absence  of  light. 

And  now  if  what  makes  the  sinfulness  of  sin  is  the  fact 
that  the  true  nature  of  man  is  righteous,  it  is  this  that  also 
makes  it  possible  he  should  recover  from  hjs  "sickness," 
since  the  natural  energies  of  the  spirit,  as  of  the  body,  work 
toward  recovery.  The  will  to  do  good,  enfeebled  though 
it  be  by  evil  habit,  still  has  in  itself  the  potency  of  a 
reactive  force  to  repair  the  waste  and  decay  of  soul.  To 
rally  and  reinvigorate  this  languid  vital  force  was  the 
work  of  the  Physician  of  the  soul.  He  took  it  up  with 
confidence,  in  the  conviction  that  deep  in  the  heart  of 
every  man  there  lives  this  power  of  recuperation,  of  change, 
of  metanoia.1  For  he  looked  on  men  and  looked  them 
through.  There  was  a  man  within  the  man,  in  publican 
and  sinner;  a  better  self,  stricken  down  by  the  worse,  it 


fectibility  of  Man — his  contribution  to  the  generous  principles  of  '89 — 
"with  the  knell  of  his  own  doom  sounding  full  in  the  ear  while  he  wrote." 

1  "  He  took  for  granted  that  there  is  a  power  intrinsic  to  the  soul  of  man 
to  react  against  the  evil,  to  disengage  itself  from  the  chain  by  which  it  binds 
him  and  to  break  that  causal  nexus  by  which  one  sin  draws  another  after 
it."  Mackintosh,  op.  tit.,  148. 


56  The  Gospel 

might  be,  but  not  powerless  to  rise  again.  It  was  no  weak 
indulgence  he  showed  the  fallen,  but  the  helpful  sympathy 
that  sought  to  lift  them  up  and  set  them  on  their  feet. 
He  never  lost  hope  in  the  human  will  and  its  power  of 
independent  action  that  makes  a  man  creator  of  his  own 
moral  life.  This  power,  which  has  always  been  latent  in 
consciousness,  he  discovers  and  evokes,  revealing  a  method 
of  redemption  which  has  always  been  possible  in  the  nature 
of  things,  not  an  afterthought,  not  a  divine  contrivance  to 
remedy  a  mistake. x  For  Jesus'  faith  in  man  was  one  with 
his  faith  in  God.  The  striking  thing  in  his  view  of  "poor 
human  nature"  is  its  steadfast  optimism;  his  magnificent 
trust  in  humanity  nothing  could  shake.  It  is  man  as  he 
ought  to  be  that  is  son  of  God,  and  he  calls  on  men  to 
become  what  they  ought  to  be.  The  severe  demands  he 
made  on  men,  his  high  and  difficult  standard  of  disciple- 
ship,  witness  to  the  high  capacities  with  which  he  credited 
humanity. 2  He  built  his  hope  upon  a  spiritual  energy  in 

1  "Redemption  is  not  a  miraculous  event,  brought  about  by  a  super- 
human mediator  between  the  Godhead  and  humanity;  it  is  an  inner  process 
within  the  heart  of  man  which  always  and  everywhere  repeats  itself  when 
the  fettered  and  diseased  powers  of  the  soul  are  freed  and  healed,  when  the 
image  of  God  and  the  child  of  God  that  slumber  in  everyone  are  aroused  to 
life,  reality,  and  power."     Pfleiderer,  Evolution  and  Theology,  103. 

2  In  regard  to  these  severe  demands  a  word  of  explanation  seems  desir- 
able.   We  find  in  the  gospels  certain  passages,  such  as  Matt,  xix,  12,  xiv, 
25-33,  xviii,  18-25,  with  the  parallels,  where  Jesus  seems  to  call  for  extreme 
and  extravagant  renunciations  and  to  countenance  the  moral  ideals  of 
asceticism.    This  would  be  to  contradict  himself.    It  is  plain  from  the  whole 
tone  and  spirit  of  his  teaching  that  he  could  not  have  contemplated  the 
possibility  that  the  ascetic  practices  and  penances  of  later  days  would 
claim  authority  derived  from  him.    His  own  life  was  free  and  open,  careless 
of  conventions;  he  shared  men's  simple  pleasures,  and  his  critics  called  him 
a  gluttonous  man  and  a  winebibber;  he  taught  no  cloistered  sanctity,  but 
the  virtues  of  the  everyday  world.    The  Gospel  found  its  pulpit  in  the  great 
market  place  of  life,  for  the  light  was  not  given  to  be  put  under  a  bushel. 

In  fact  however  there  is  no  contradiction  here.  It  is  his  own  case  he  has 
in  mind  in  the  passage  from  Matthew.  He  made  himself  a  eunuch  for  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven's  sake  because  marriage  would  have  hampered  the 


The  Gospel  57 

all  men,  however  latent  it  might  be  and  weakened  from 
long  disuse,  yet  powerful  enough  to  free  one  from  the 
grasp  of  his  baser  self.  A  man's  first  need  is  to  be  en- 
couraged to  exert  that  energy;  then,  and  not  before,  the 
lonely  human  will  shall  find  itself  in  presence  of  an  Infinite 
Ally  and  upheld  by  a  mighty  arm  on  the  steep  path  of  the 
higher  life.  For  it  is  not  that  God  will  not,  He  cannot 
save  a  man  until  he  struggles  to  save  himself.  The  solemn 
issues  of  soul  life  are  placed  in  our  hands.  Realising  the 
responsibilities  of  our  spiritual  freedom,  and  treading 
ever  on  the  brink  of  hope  and  fear,  the  Gospel  of  Jesus 
comes  to  us  with  a  liberating  appeal  to  the  oppressed, 
unquiet  conscience  to  put  its  trust  in  the  unfailing  love  of 
God,  and  steadfastly  to  work  out  its  self-regeneration, 
assured  that  since  this  is  the  Father's  will  He  will  lend  the 
work  His  aid. 

That  morality  is  one  with  religion,  that  righteousness  is 
the  service  of  God,  was  the  high  conviction  attained  by 
the  prophets  of  Israel,  surpassing  the  gross  ideas  of  their 


work  to  which  he  was  called;  and  when  we  think  of  his  great  love  for  children 
and  his  high  esteem  for  women — supposed  by  orientals  to  have  no  souls — 
we  see  how  real  was  the  sacrifice.  At  the  time  this  gospel  was  written, 
ascetic  teachings  were  in  the  air,  and  it  was  easy  to  give  the  words  of  Jesus 
an  ascetic  turn:  "He  that  is  able  to  receive  it  let  him  receive  it."  In  these 
words,  as  in  Matt,  xix,  21:  "If  thou  wilt  be  perfect"  (a  quasi-technical 
term),  we  find  thus  early  the  germs  of  that  double  morality,  one  for  the 
ordinary  Christian,  one  for  the  monk,  which  worked  such  evil  in  after  days. 
As  for  the  other  passages  it  is  through  an  unfortunate  misunderstanding 
that  these  demands  are  supposed  to  be  addressed  to  all  men  under  all 
circumstances,  and  not  rather  to  a  few  in  a  time  of  crisis.  Jesus  was  on  his 
way  to  Jerusalem  to  attack  in  its  stronghold  the  all-powerful  religion  which 
in  Galilee  had  shut  the  Kingdom  of  heaven  against  men.  No  bolder  or  more 
desperate  enterprise  was  ever  planned.  It  was  no  work  for  weaklings. 
These  hard  exactions  were  tests  to  winnow  the  fit  from  the  unfit.  The  men 
whom  Jesus  called  to  "follow  him"  on  this  forlorn  hope  had  need  of  splen- 
did courage,  of  overwhelming  enthusiasm,  of  a  single-minded  devotion  that 
would  throw  everything  to  the  winds  which  might  lure  their  hearts  from  the 
one  set  purpose,  or  tie  their  hands  in  the  supreme  endeavor. 


58  The  Gospel 

early  time,  which  gives  them  immortal  life  in  the  religious 
history  of  mankind.  This  Jesus  begins  with  and  develops. 
He  sought  to  waken  a  sense  of  the  living  bond  that  unites 
man  to  God  and  goodness.  The  "life"  he  brought  to  men 
is  a  changed  relationship  to  God,  but  the  change  arises 
only  from  men's  becoming  conscious  of  the  relation  in 
which  they  have  their  being.  "God  and  the  soul — the 
soul  and  its  God,  there  is  the  kernel  of  his  teaching" 
(Harnack).  We  hear  in  conscience  the  inward  voice  of 
a  mysterious  guest.  If  Aurelius  could  say,  "I  reverence 
the  God  who  is  within,"  it  is  because  conscience  is  in 
germ  a  consciousness  of  God,  and  morality  explains  itself 
as  a  relation  to  God,  since  what  is  absolutely  and  essen- 
tially divine  is  goodness.  It  follows  that  in  his  capacity 
for  goodness  man  is  virtually  of  the  divine  nature,  and  the 
end  of  his  life  is  to  realise  this  promise  and  potency,  and 
by  striving  to  be  like  Him  rise  to  affinity  with  God :  Love 
your  enemies  that  ye  may  be  children  of  your  Father; 
be  ye  perfect  even  as  your  Father  is  perfect. x 

This,  I  say,  is  the  heart  of  the  Gospel,  that  Man  and 
every  man  is  the  child  of  God,  that  the  spirit  which  we 
are  is  one  with  the  Spirit  whose  we  are.  It  holds  within  it 
far  reaching  issues :  the  meaning  of  the  authority  of  right- 
eousness and  of  the  awfulness  of  sin,  the  secret  of  life,  the 
boundless  promise  of  the  future.  This  exaltation  of  man 
is  the  explanation  of  man.  As  consciousness  rests  upon 
self-consciousness,  so  that  is  complete  only  in  religious 
consciousness — the  knowing  of  self  in  God,  or  the  knowing 
of  God  in  knowing  self.  This  organic  relation  of  God  and 
man  the  Gospel  reveals  as  the  primordial  fact  of  the  human 

1  "So  much  stress  is  laid  on  the  necessity  of  moral  improvement  that  a 
spiritual  change  is  frequently  regarded  merely  as  a  particularly  efficacious 
means  of  effecting  a  moral  change.  The  identity  of  the  spiritual  life  and  the 
moral  is  emphasised;  their  difference,  and  the  wider  area  of  the  former, 
tends  to  be  lost  from  view."  Jevons,  An  Introduction  to  the  History  of 
Religion,  344. 


The  Gospel  59 

condition,  but  it  is  a  fact  to  which  Christendom  has  been 
blind.  The  great  revelation  has  fallen  out  of  mind  and 
been  forgotten,  and  ideas  of  the  relations  of  God  and  man 
have  still  been  borrowed  from  thrones  of  kings  and  courts 
of  law,  while  the  Church  has  been  busy  formulating  and 
fighting  over  doctrines  Jesus  knew  nothing  of,  nor  would 
have  cared  to  know.  If  men  came  to  grasp  the  full 
meaning  of  the  words,  Our  Father,  with  all  that  they 
imply  and  lead  to — the  common  nature,  or  the  divinity  of 
man,  the  filial  relation  and  its  close  intimacy  of  mutual 
affection,  its  unity  of  will — there  would  dawn  upon  them 
such  a  vision  as  it  has  not  entered  the  world's  heart  to 
conceive. 

Everything  a  child  has  comes  from  its  father;  he  is  the 
giver  of  all  good  things.  For  the  true  natur6  of  father- 
hood is  love,  and  all  true  love  is  the  desire  to  give.  It  may 
be  bread  we  give,  or  sympathy  and  help,  it  may  be  our 
whole  self;  but  always  love  means  giving,  and  because 
He  is  the  universal  Giver  we  know  that  God  is  Love. 
And  since  the  whole  nature  follows  love,  the  response  of 
our  heart  to  Him  who  first  loved  us  is  the  giving  of  our- 
selves to  Him.  All  that  is  good  is  of  Him,  and  the  love  of 
God  means  love  of  perfection,  self-devotion  to  all  that  is 
highest  and  best.  And  in  this  is  our  growth  into  likeness 
with  the  Father,  for  we  must  inevitably  grow  like  to  what 
we  supremely  love.  There  is  pathos  in  that  noble  saying 
of  a  great  writer,  as  of  a  lost  child  ignorant  of  his  parentage : 
"Somewhere  there  exists  perfection,  therefore  I  strive." 

And  he  that  loveth  God  will  love  his  brother  also;  of 
the  two  great  commandments  the  second  is  not  only  like 
the  first,  but  one  with  it.  As  the  Gospel  truth  that  man  is 
son  of  God  throws  a  revealing  light  into  the  "abysmal 
depths  of  personality"  and  it  is  only  in  that  light  that 
man  can  see  and  know  himself,  so  its  corollary  is  evident. 
If  it  is  in  my  essential  humanity  that  my  relation  to  God 


60  The  Gospel 

subsists,  then  all  men  hold  the  same  relation,  and  men  are 
to  one  another  what  that  relation  makes  them.  There 
can  be  no  personal  relation  to  God  that  does  not  involve 
the  corresponding  relation  to  men.  In  our  sonship  to  one 
Father  all  of  us  are  brothers.  This  consciousness  that 
manhood  means  brotherhood  is  the  centripetal  force  to 
social  unity  and  its  one  living,  lasting  bond.  In  every 
man,  because  he  is  a  man,  we  are  to  see  our  brother; 
however  degraded  he  may  be,  he  is  our  Father's  Son.  The 
good  God  loves  all  men,  and  if  we  love  not  one  another  we 
are  unfaithful  to  our  heavenward  calling  to  live  as  children 
of  our  Father  and  to  His  supreme  requirement  of  likeness 
to  Himself.  And  so  Love,  this  great  unifying  power  of. 
brother  men,  is  vital  to  religion.  A  devotion  to  God  that 
remains  indifferent  to  social  claims  and  the  needs  of 
brother  men  is  but  a  spiritual  selfishness  that  loses  the 
soul  it  seeks  to  save.  The  root  of  all  evil  in  the  world  is 
self,  therefore  love  is  salvation.  When  love  is  the  one 
motive  power  of  life  the  eternal  life  is  already  begun. x  It 
is  the  divine  law  that  self  inclusion  is  suicidal.  There  is  no 
independent  individual;  individuality  is  only  sustained 
through  its  relations  with  others;  membership  in  society 
makes  one  what  he  is,  and  taken  out  of  it  he  will  lose 
humanity  and  lapse  into  the  brute. 2  To  go  out  of  oneself, 
to  give  oneself,  to  be  one  with  others,  is  the  only  way  to 
realise  oneself.  Thus  love  reveals  itself  as  the  law  of  our 
being,  and  in  the  life  it  calls  us  to  we  see  the  fulfilment  of 
the  destiny  which  is  linked  with  our  origin — growth  un- 
to the  perfect  man  who  is  a  son  of  God.  That  this  life  is  not 
the  vain  attempt  to  be  something  greater  and  nobler  than 
we  can  be,  history  makes  evident.  The  revolution  wrought 

1  The  picture  of  the  Last  Judgment  attributed  to  Jesus  in  Matt,  xxiv, 
31-46,  though  probably  not  genuine  in  that  attribution,  is  certainly  genuine 
in  its  accordance  with  the  spirit  of  his  teaching. 

2  Selkirk  on  his  island  had  forgotten  how  to  talk,  but  had  learned  to  catch 
the  wild  goat  by  running  it  down. 


The  Gospel  61 

by  the  first  Christians  was  the  work  of  the  new  spirit 
within  them.  "See  how  these  Christians  love  one 
another"  is  the  reported  saying  of  astonished  Romans,  and 
if  it  was  not  said,  it  might  well  have  been.  Of  all  the 
miracles  that  attested  their  divine  mission  none  was  more 
impressive  than  that  hymn  in  praise  of  Love  written  by  a 
Jew  of  Tarsus  in  the  reign  of  Nero.  These  words,  and 
those  of  that  beautiful  writing  we  call  the  first  Epistle  of 
St.  John,  were  sealed  and  ratified  by  the  acts  of  the 
Apostles.  Their  labors  and  sufferings  for  their  great 
cause,  their  ardor  of  self-devotion,  their  heroism  in  danger 
and  death,  all  certify  their  genuine  discipleship,  and  wit- 
ness to  their  inspiration  by  the  Master.  / 

For  all  there  is  in  Christian  thought  and  life  that  has 
made  for  the  world's  uplifting  goes  back  to  him.1  Jesus 
not  only  preached  the  Gospel,  he  lived  the  Gospel,  and  the 
Gospel  is  never  itself  when  separated  from  Jesus.  He 
himself  stands  behind  everything  he  said.  He  embodied 
and  exemplified  the  truths  he  taught,  and  what  he  said 
took  hold  on  men  because  of  what  he  was.  If  he  freed  and 
strengthened  the  weak  and  wavering  will,  it  was  because 
his  disciples  gathered  courage,  not  from  his  words  so  much 
as  from  him,  himself.  By  personal  fidelity  to  his  own 
transcendent  ideal  he  stamped  the  beauty  and  the  appeal 
of  it  upon  the  companions  who  afterward  spread  the  story 
of  his  life  among  men,  and  persuaded  them  to  make  it  the 
pattern  of  their  own.2  His  teaching  was  but  the  utter- 

1  "Of  the  debt  which  Christendom  owes  to  the  personality  of  Christ  I 
need  not  attempt  to  speak.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  from  highest  to  lowest, 
from  the  most  heroic  to  the  most  homely,  all  the  good  desires  and  good 
deeds  of  Christian  men  and  women  have  been  due  (so  far  as  their  origin  has 
been  distinctively  Christian)to  the  personal  influence  of  the  historic  Christ, 
— in  other  words,  to  affection  for  and  trust  in  the  friend  and  guide  and 
master  whom  the  Gospel  stories  taught  men,  and  still  teach  men,  to  know 
and  love."  The  Creed  of  Christ,  202. 

8  "Glorious  as  the  message  was,  the  dynamite  of  Christianity  lies  not  in 


62  The  Gospel 

ance  of  his  own  inner  life,  and  his  consciousness  the  seed 
whence  the  Gospel  springs.  Hence  it  was  that  his  great 
ideas  became  luminous  to  the  humblest  mind.  Always 
it  is  the  power  of  personality  rather  than  that  of  intellect 
that  works  momentous  changes  in  the  world;  and  this, 
it  has  been  pointed  out,  may  be  seen  in  the  contrast  be- 
tween the  practical  influence  of  Plato  and  of  Mohammed. 

As  George  Eliot  tells  us: 

Ideas  are  often  poor  ghosts;  they  pass  athwart  us  in  thin 
vapor,  and  cannot  make  themselves  felt.  But  sometimes  they 
are  made  flesh;  they  are  clothed  in  a  living  soul  with  all  its 
faiths  and  energies;  they  breathe  upon  us  with  warm  breath 
and  look  upon  us  with  appealing  eyes.  Then  their  presence 
is  a  power;  then  they  shake  us  like  a  passion;  and  we  are 
drawn  after  them  as  flame  is  drawn  to  flame. 

So  it  has  been  with  the  thoughts  and  words  of  Jesus. 

He  appealed  to  his  hearers  not  merely  by  word  of  mouth, 
but  over  and  above  this  by  his  superiority  to  the  common 
weaknesses  of  men,  by  his  deep  tenderness,  by  his  singleness  of 
purpose,  by  his  zeal  for  the  good  of  others,  by  his  serene  con- 
fidence in  the  love  of  God  which  no  strait  or  danger  could  dis- 
turb :  by  all  this  he  stirred  imagination,  awakened  sympathy, 
roused  enthusiasm,  and  gained  for  himself  the  devotion  of  all 
who  were  open  to  spiritual  impressions  and  sensitive  to  spiri- 
tual nobility.1 

His  spoken  teaching  the  world  doubtless  would  have 
treasured,  as  it  has  the  teaching  of  Socrates,  but  that 

it,  but  in  the  Master.  It  was  not  because  Jesus  laid  down  the  Golden  Rule 
that  he  taught  the  people  as  one  having  authority;  it  was  because  he  himself 
was  a  Golden  Rule  incarnate.  It  was  not  because  he  spoke  the  Beatitudes 
that  they  heard  him  gladly ;  it  was  because  his  life  was  a  beatitude.  It  was 
not  because  he  taught  in  beautiful  parables  that  they  loved  him;  it  was 
because  the  spirit  of  his  life  touched  them  with  vital  inspiration."  Crocker, 
The  Supremacy  of  Jesus,  24.  x  Mackintosh,  op.  tit.,  57. 


The  Gospel  63 

alone  does  not  explain  the  centuries  of  Christian  history. 
The  power  of  his  religion  in  the  world  has  come  from  its 
holding  up  the  type  of  religious  perfection  in  the  person  of 
a  man  who  has  walked  our  earth.  Hence  the  Gospel  ideal 
receives  the  stamp  of  concrete  reality,  of  life,  and  gains 
the  endless  power  to  fascinate  and  attract  which  only  life 
and  reality  can  give;  and  hence  it  has  won  the  greatest 
victory  of  idealism  that  humanity  has  known.  His  life, 
I  say,  was  an  object  lesson.  It  was  in  his  own  relation  to 
Him  that  Jesus  showed  men  the  Father,  and  that  intimate 
union  which  made  God  the  life  of  his  life  he  would  have 
men  know  was  open  to  them  all.  This  son  of  God  declares 
that  we  too  are  sons  of  God,  and  every  one  of  us  may  say 
with  him,  "I  and  my  Father  are  one."  And  so  he  in  his 
own  person  reveals  humanity  to  itself.  The  Christian 
consciousness  finds  its  origin  in  his,  and  his  life,  one  with 
the  God  he  revealed,  is  the  creative  force  of  all  spiritual 
life  in  Christendom.  The  obsqure  hints,  suggestions, 
"shadowy  recollections"  of  the  religious  instinct,  which 
hardly  understand  themselves,  feel  after  his  communion 
with  God,  so  consciously  definite,  for  their  satisfying 
realisation.  What  he  saw  other  men  have  come  to  see 
through  his  eyes ;  what  he  felt  others  have  come  to  feel  in 
the  measure  of  their  effort  to  make  themselves  like  him. 
Jesus  himself  has  always  been  the  life  of  his  religion.  His 
personality  was  a  magnet  more  potent  than  his  word,  and 
once  to  come  under  its  spell  was  to  be  his  forever.  That 
personality  it  was  that  from  beyond  the  grave  drew 
together  the  scattered  disciples  and  founded  a  spiritual 
brotherhood,  and  in  all  the  life  of  man  none  other  has  left 
such  impress  upon  the  world.  Always  the  faith  of  his 
true  followers  has  centred  on  the  personal  Jesus,  kept 
warm  and  living  by  his  presence,  and  growing  feeble  and 
fruitless  as  it  has  wandered  away  from  him  to  theories 
about  him  and  the  doctrines  of  divines.  "As  many  as 


64  The  Gospel 

received  him, "  writes  an  Evangelist,  "to  them  he  gave 
power  to  become  sons  of  God."  In  truth  Jesus  is  his 
Gospel.  He  is  man  as  he  ought  to  be:  "an  exemplar 
vouchsafed  in  an  early  age  of  the  world  of  what  man  may 
and  should  become  in  the  course  of  ages,  in  his  progress  to- 
ward the  fulfilment  of  his  destiny."  He  is  the  realisation 
of  man's  potential  divinity,  "the  highest  we  know  or  are 
able  to  conceive,"  and  "the  one  towering  perpetual  miracle 
of  history."  He  is  the  man  who  enters  into  possession  of 
the  freedom  and  power  of  the  spirit,  who  achieves  a 
completed  personality,  and  leaves  it  as  the  greatest  of 
possible  gifts  to  mankind — greatest  because  out  of 
the  completed  personality  all  other  achievements  come: 
leaves  it  for  the  goal  of  the  striving  of  likeminded  men  in 
all  after  time. 

In  the  foregoing  I  have  not  been  able  to  consider  the 
teaching  of  Jesus  in  detail,  its  many  special  themes  of 
moment  and  interest,  but  have  touched  only  on  the  central 
principles  of  the  Gospel.  Of  these  the  implications  and 
applications  are  manifold  and  multiform,  the  range  bound- 
less of  their  bearing  upon  human  life,  and  such  their  trans- 
forming power  that  if  followed  out  and  acted  on  the  world 
would  be  born  anew.  It  was  perhaps  a  sense  of  the  infini- 
tude of  the  spiritual  influence  of  its  divine  hero  that  led 
to  the  conclusion  of  the  fourth  gospel:  "And  there  are 
also  many  other  things  which  Jesus  did,  the  which  if  they 
should  be  written  every  one,  I  suppose  that  even  the  world 
itself  would  not  contain  the  books  that  should  be  written." 


II 

Messianism 

PHE  "Messianic  Hope"  as  we  meet  with  it  in  the  time 
*  of  Jesus  sprang  from  roots  in  the  distant  past.  A 
conviction  of  the  power  and  the  favor  of  the  national  god 
was  common  to  all  early  peoples,  and  with  Israel  this 
conviction  was  exceptionally  strong  owing  to  the  marvel- 
lous interposition  of  Jehovah  on  their  behalf  at  the  starting 
point  of  their  history,  the  Exodus  from  Egypt.  That 
wonderful  divine  deliverance  left  an  ineffaceable  impres- 
sion on  the  people's  mind  and  fostered  a  confident  trust  in 
the  god  who  had  shown  himself  so  mighty  to  save.  More- 
over their  mutual  relations  were  rendered  particularly 
close  by  an  arrangement,  or  understanding,  supposed  to 
have  been  arrived  at  between  Jehovah  and  Israel  through 
their  great  leader  acting  as  their  representative.  This 
entente,  though  it  took  the  name  of  a  covenant,  was  not 
strictly  held  to  express  reciprocal  obligations.  That  the 
people  ought  to  observe  its  terms  was  acknowledged,  but 
it  was  viewed  as  still  binding  the  god  although  they 
might  fail  to  do  so.  For  it  was  prior  to  the  covenant 
and  without  imposing  conditions  that  Jehovah  had  given 
striking  proof  of  his  favor,  and  it  was  not  to  be  supposed 
that  his  purpose  to  protect  and  exalt  his  people  would 
permit  itself  to  be  defeated  by  any  temporary  infidelities 
on  their  part. 

s  65 


66  Messianism 

When  in  the  eighth  century  the  higher  thought  of  the 
Prophets  had  risen  to  the  monotheistic  faith,  the  notion  of 
a  covenant  with  the  national  god  took  the  form  of  belief 
in  a  divine  election,  and  Amos  proclaimed  that  the  God 
of  the  Universe  had  chosen  Israel  for  his  own  out  of  all  the 
nations  of  the  earth.  This  faith,  bringing  confidence  in 
their  destiny  as  a  peculiar  people,  proteges  of  heaven, 
suffered  a  rude  shock  when  in  later  days  calamity  fell 
heavily  upon  the  nation.  The  miserable  present  seemed  to 
falsify  the  legitimate  expectations  of  the  people,  and  it  was 
only  by  throwing  themselves  with  all  their  souls  upon  the 
hope  of  a  better  future  that  their  faith  in  their  god  could 
survive.  Unless  he  had  in  store  for  them  a  complete 
revival  of  the  national  fortunes,  their  faith  in  him  was  a 
delusion.  Thus  the  religion  of  Israel  became  bound  up 
with  the  hope  of  a  golden  age  to  come  through  some 
catastrophic  manifestation  of  divine  power.  The  "Day 
of  Jehovah"  was  to  be  a  day  of  god-given  deliverance, 
when  Israel  should  see  their  enemies  condemned  and 
punished,  and  should  enter  upon  an  epoch  of  unexampled 
felicity.  The  greater  the  evils  of  the  time,  the  more 
tenaciously  devout  spirits  clung  to  this  hope,  and  by  their 
confident  predictions  of  a  splendid  future  the  prophets 
sought  to  sustain  the  fainting  faith  of  the  people.  A  few 
however  read  the  signs  of  the  time  with  clearer  eyes.  It 
was  his  people  that  Jehovah  would  judge  first  of  all ;  he 
would  scourge  them  for  their  iniquities,  and  no  multitude 
of  sacrifices  would  avail  to  stay  his  hand.  At  that  time  of 
woe  the  wicked  would  be  cut  off,  but  a  remnant  would 
be  saved  for  the  nucleus  of  a  righteous  nation  of  the  future. 
These  prophets  of  doom  were  justified  by  the  event,  and 
to  this  we  owe  the  preservation  of  their  oracles,  while 
those  of  the  many  Hananiahs  were  lost.  When  the  blow 
had  fallen  and  the  worst  had  come,  and  the  exiles  felt 
that  the  sins  of  Israel  were  expiated,  the  ancient  hope 


Messianism  67 

revived  among  them,  but  now,  with  the  loftier  minds  at 
least,  it  gained  a  larger  scope.  Hitherto  the  outlook  had 
been  bounded  by  the  circumstances  of  the  present  and 
limited  to  the  future  of  the  nation.  That  the  nation 
should  be  morally  purified,  that  it  should  see  its  enemies 
destroyed  and  itself  independent  and  respected,  that  it 
should  be  governed  by  strong  and  righteous  kings  of  the 
Davidic  line  under  whose  sway  lasting  peace  and  pros- 
perity should  be  secured, — this  was  in  substance  tlfe  hope 
of  Israel.  Now  the  vivid  intensity  of  their  monotheistic 
faith  gave  to  the  hope  of  the  later  prophets  the  character 
of  a  generous  universalism.  The  eye  of  the  seer  swept  the 
wide  horizon  of  the  world  and  beheld  Israel  as  it  were  the 
elder  sister  of  the  nations,  and  charged  with  something 
of  parental  duty  toward  them.  At  her  summons  the 
Gentiles  would  come  to  her  light,  and  kings  to  the  bright- 
ness of  her  rising,  and  their  gathering  unto  Zion  would 
be  their  acknowledgment  of  Jehovah's  sovereignty  over 
the  whole  earth.  But  as  the  people  had  failed  to  respond 
to  the  prophetic  teaching  that  their  relation  to  God  was 
dependent  on  moral  conditions — that  the  divine  election 
was  not  an  act  of  capricious  partiality,  but  its  end  was  to 
make  of  them  a  nation  trained  and  devoted  to  righteous- 
ness— so  now  they  failed  to  rise  to  the  prophetic  vision 
and  the  missionary  purpose  of  their  calling,  and  clung  to 
simple  belief  in  the  divine  favoritism,  their  aspirations 
limited  to  a  great  future  for  Israel  alone.  This  racial 
egotism  gave  its  character  to  the  national  hope  that 
prevailed  in  Judea  after  the  return  from  Babylon  and 
when  the  voice  of  prophecy  had  fallen  silent.  The  whole 
life  of  the  people  now  became  a  service  to  the  Law  in  the 
hope  of  future  reward.  Jehovah  had  bound  himself  to 
bestow  prosperity  and  happiness  upon  his  people  on 
condition  that  they  observed  his  Law,  and  their  zealous 
devotion  to  its  ordinances  was  inspired  by  eager  expecta- 


68  Messianism 

tion  of  the  halcyon  days  to  come.  The  time  came  when 
the  divine  promises  seemed  close  upon  fulfilment,  and 
just  then  the  excitement  of  hope  gained  impetus  from  the 
message  of  a  new  seer.  The  Book  of  Daniel,  written  to 
rouse  the  energies  of  the  Jewish  people  in  the  struggle 
against  Antiochus,  consists  of  "a  sort  of  his  historical 
romance  with  an  apocalyptic  sequel,"  and  by  the  simple 
device  of  antedating  its  composition  it  affected  to  predict 
events  which  in  the  Maccabean  age  were  matters  of 
history;  thus  the  seeming  fulfilment  of  earlier  predictions 
won  credit  for  its  disclosure  of  events  yet  to  come.  The 
effect  of  these  revelations  was  to  lend  distinctness  and 
solidity  to  the  vague  and  variable  object  of  the  people's 
longing  by  depicting  it  as  the  coming  of  a  Jewish  world- 
kingdom  which  should  overthrow  and  supplant  the  great 
monarchies  of  the  day.  An  irresistible  exertion  of  Jeho- 
vah's power  would  exalt  his  people  to  dominion  over  the 
Gentiles  to  the  ends  of  the  earth,  and  the  pious  dead  would 
rise  to  share  in  the  glories  of  the  new  Jerusalem.  This 
remarkable  work  made  a  deep  impression  upon  the  mind 
of  succeeding  generations  and  remained  a  type  and  pattern 
for  the  subsequent  apocalyptic  literature  to  which  it  gave 
the  impulse.  It  may  be  remarked  that  while  apocalyptic 
is  not  peculiarly  a  Jewish  product,  what  is  peculiar  to  the 
Jewish  pseudepigraphs  is  an  influence  upon  the  mind  of 
the  people  such  as  the  deliverances  ascribed  to  Hermes, 
Orpheus,  Pythagoras  and  the  Sibyls  never  attained. 
During  the  century  following  the  appearance  of  the  Book 
of  Daniel  several  such  mystical  writings  explored  farther 
recesses  of  the  future  and  added  other  features  to  its 
picture,  and  finally  among  these  imaginative  prognostica- 
tions a  new  conception  was  developed  and  a  new  personage 
introduced  upon  the  scene. 

The  Messianic  Hope,  properly  so  called,  appears  for  the 
first  time  in  the  history  of  Israel  soon  after  the  year 


Messianism  69 

63  B.C.  in  a  writing  emanating  from  the  Pharisaic  party 
which  for  a  generation  had  been  at  feud  with  the  Has-v 
monean  dynasty.  According  to  the  prediction  of  this 
"Psalter  of  Solomon"  the  Roman  power,  Jehovah's 
instrument  to  drive  out  the  usurpers  of  the  throne  of 
David,  shall  itself  be  overthrown  by  the  rightful  King  of 
Israel,  the  Lord's  anointed,  who  will  come  at  the  destined 
hour  to  free  Jerusalem  from  all  foreign  oppression,  to 
bring  the  nations  under  his  yoke  and  to  reign  in  justice 
and  wisdom  over  the  sanctified  people  of  Jehovah.  It  is 
said  that  he  will  crush  all  impious  resistance  by  "the  word 
of  his  mouth,"  upon  which  Schurer  remarks:  "Not- 
withstanding such  idealism  he  is  represented  as  quite 
a  worldly  ruler  ...  as  altogether  a  human  king,  but 
endowed  by  God  with  special  gifts  and  powers."  *  A  care- 
ful study  reaches  the  conclusion  that  up  to  the  Roman 
period  the  whole  field  of  the  future  as  it  lay  in  Israel's 
expectation  has  no  place  for  such  a  personage  as  this. 
"The  original  Messianic  Hope  did  not  expect  an  individual 
Messiah  at  all."2  The  new  Israel  is  delivered  and  ruled 
by  God;  it  is  Jehovah  himself  who  fights  against  the 
nations,  judges  the  world  and  reigns  on  earth.  We  find 
the  term  Messiah  used  to  designate  kings,  high  priests 
and  the  priestly  rulers  of  the  Maccabean  house  who  had 
actually  received  anointment;  we  find  it  used  as  a  poetic 
embodiment  of  the  Davidic  royalty,  and  we  find  a  prophet 
giving  to  Cyrus,  and  Psalmists  giving  to  the  people  of 
Israel,  the  title  of  Jehovah's  anointed,  but  never  does  it 
stand  for  this  coming  deliverer  of  the  Psalter  of  Solomon 
before  the  appearance  of  that  book.3 

1  History  of  the  Jewish  People  in  the  Time  of  Jesus  Christ.  .  .  .  Sec. 
Div.,  vol.  ii,  142  and  160, 

a  Schurer,  op.  cit.,  Sec.  Div.,  vol.  ii,  159. 

s  "  Messianism  is  that  fixed  social  belief  of  the  Jewish  people  that  Jehovah 
would  deliver  Israel  and  erect  it  into  a  glorious  empire  to  which  a  conquered 
world  would  be  subject.  .  .  .  The  central  and  ever  present  element  of 


70  Messianism 

The  r61e  assigned  to  its  hero  is  purely  political,  and  this 
Messianic  Hope  was  cherished  only  by  some  fractions  of  the 
people  until  it  was  greatly  modified  when  in  course  of  time 
a  personal  Messiah  was  taken  up  into  the  transcendental 
eschatology  of  the  later  apocalyptic  and  became  wide- 
spread among  all  classes.  Yet  it  was  not  in  accord  with  the 
feeling  prevalent  in  those  days  that  a  new  religious  con- 
ception should  be  presented  as  a  novelty,  and  at  once  the 
Scriptures  were  searched  to  discover  promises  of  this 
Messiah,  and  predictions  of  his  coming  were  read  into  the 
prophecy  and  poetry  of  the  past.  Wherever  a  hope  was 
expressed  of  a  change  in  the  fortunes  of  Israel,  of  victory 
over  enemies,  of  better  things  to  come,  forthwith  it  was 
imagined  that  the  author  had  in  mind  the  Messiah  and  his 
reign,  and  this  personage  was  given  a  place  in  pictures  of 
the  future  which  had  been  drawn  without  any  reference  to 
him.  The  same  method  of  dealing  with  the  sacred  writings 
was  adapted  to  their  uses  by  the  early  Christians,  and  to 
this  day  a  fixed  preconception  applies  the  term  messianic 
to  numerous  passages  which  critical  investigation  con- 
clusively shows  to  contain  no  allusion  whatever  to  a 
Messiah.  "The  Hebrew  Bible,"  it  has  been  said,  "con- 
tains no  prophecy  of  the  appearance  upon  earth  of  such  a 
personage  as  Jesus  of  Nazareth;  nor  does  it  anywhere 
predict  the  coming  of  such  a  being  as  the  Messiah  of 
Jewish  thought  was  in  the  Roman  period.  .  .  .  Neither 
was  ever  dreamed  of  by  the  men  whose  thoughts  are 
revealed  in  the  Old  Testament."1 

the  'Messianic  Hope'  was  that  of  a  divinely  established  deliverance  and 
kingdom.  The  King  was  but  an  accessory  and  might  not  figure,  except  by 
implication,  in  one's  hope  for  the  nation's  future." 

Shailer  Mathews,  The  Messianic  Hope  in  the  New  Testament,  3. 

Then  is  it  not  misleading  and  a  misuse  of  terms  to  call  this  "fixed 
belief  of  the  Jewish  people,"  or  their  firm  faith  in  their  national  God,  the 
Messianic  Hope? 

1  To  establish  this  proposition  would  require  far  more  space  than  I  have 


Messianism  71 

Turning  now  to  the  Christian  Scriptures,  we  gather 
from  the  gospels  that  belief  in  the  coming  of  a  personal 
Messiah  was  widespread  among  the  people  at  the  time  to 
which  they  refer,  and  it  is  their  contention  that  Jesus  of 
Nazareth  is  the  Messiah  who  should  come.  The  question 
to  be  considered  is  what  was  the  attitude  of  Jesus  himself 
toward  the  popular  belief. 

The  Gospel  of  Jesus  is  the  revelation  of  the  only  centre 
and  foundation  of  the  real  life  of  man;  the  Christian 
Religion  is  the  embodiment  of  men's  efforts  to  apprehend 
that  revelation  and  to  live  in  its  light.  It  is  said  that  spirit 
must  clothe  itself  with  an  embodiment;  that,  men  being 
what  they  are,  an  ideal  in  naked  essence  will  take  little 
hold  upon  the  world,  and  if  it  is  to  work  effectively  as  a 
practical  power  it  must  realize  itself  under  forms  in  accord 
with  tr^e  requirements  of  the  intellectual  and  moral 
conditions  of  a  given  time.  It  may  be  so,  and  yet  in 
doing  this  it  pays  the  price.  Ideal  truth  cannot  leave 
the  realm  of  inwardness  and  pass  into  an  outer  world  of 
modifying  circumstance  without  suffering  loss.  The 
Gospel  is  in  its  principles  so  profound  and  so  simple,  so 
intensely  vital  and  so  penetrative  to  the  depth  of  our  being, 
that  it  could  not  but  lose  something  of  its  native  purity 
and  power  in  its  apprehension  by  minds  possessed  by 
various  preconceptions  and  in  its  adaptation  to  the  needs 
of  a  popular  religious  society.  In  the  adjustment  of 
Christianity  to  the  life  of  the  world  many  things  were 

at  command,  and  for  the  argument  in  its  support  I  refer  the  reader  to  The 
Prophet  of  Nazareth,  by  Prof.  Nathaniel  Schmidt,  chapters  iii  and  iv, 
whence  the  above  citation  is  taken.  See  also  Marti,  The  Religion  of  the  Old 
Testament,  178-179. 

There  is  one  important  fact  that  we  have  to  keep  in  mind  in  all  discussion 
of  the  Messianic  Hope,  a  fact  which  is  commonly  overlooked,  and  that  is 
that  the  Messiah  is  a  mere  creation  of  Jewish  imagination  and  no  more  a 
real  being  than  the  personages  of  Greek  mythology. 


72  Messianism 

fused  with  it  which  lacked  affinity  with  its  spirit,  and  as  it 
took  up  elements  of  the  world  into  itself  it  was  itself  taken 
up  into  the  elements  of  the  world.  This  we  may  grant 
was  an  historical  necessity,  but  that  renders  it  no  less 
calamitous.  The  reason,  or  the  chief  one,  why  an  ideal 
loses  in  realisation  is  the  weakness  and  dulness  and  per- 
versity of  men.  The  Gosjpel  seeks  to  lift  men  up,  to 
recreate  them  through  the  revelation  of  their  sonship  to 
God,  and  coming  to  men  with  this  high  message,  men  pull 
it  down  to  their  level,  cut  it  to  fit  their  limitations,  make 
it  over  in  their  own  image;  and  this  is  the  pitiful  thing  that 
takes  the  imposing  name  of  historical  necessity. x  And  if 
the  Gospel  underwent  distorting  modification  when  it  was 
made  into  a  religion,  that  is,  a  creed  and  a  cultus  rather 
than  a  life,  so  it  was  with  the  Preacher  of  the  Gospel  when 
he  was  identified  with  the  Jewish  Messiah.  This  too  may 
have  been  an  historic  necessity,  a  belief  indispensable  to 
the  planting  of  the  Church,  since  it  was  the  vehicle  that 
brought  into  the  minds  and  hearts  of  the  earliest  converts 
influences  too  pure  and  spiritual  to  live  at  first  without  it. 
To  this  Jewish  conception  of  him  we  owe  it  that  we  have 
any  memoirs  of  Jesus  at  all,  yet  its  effect  had  been  dis- 
astrous in  coloring  and  distorting  those  memoirs  and  in 
clouding  and  confusing  our  view  of  the  person,  life  and 
work  of  the  real  Jesus. 

"The  Disciples  were  called  Christians  first  in  Antioch." 
Here  in  the  heathen  capital  the  Hellenists,  driven  from  the 
Holy  City,  were  distinguishable  from  other  Jews,  for  it  was 
seen  that  they  had  ceased  to  observe  the  Law,  and  had 
laid  aside  their  racial  exclusiveness.  Still,  it  is  not  their 

1  "We  seek  to  recur  to  the  pure  ideal  because  it  has  always  been  the 
weakness  of  humanity  to  confound  the  passing  with  the  permanent,  the 
human  with  the  divine,  the  essential  with  the  adventitious.  We  seek  to 
strip  off  that  which  is  adventitious  only  in  order  that  we  may  hold  the  more 
firmly  to  that  which  is  essential,  as  we  face  the  work  which  Christianity  has 
yet  to  do."  Moore,  The  New  Testament  in  the  Christian  Church,  291. 


Messianism  73 

name  that  tells  their  separation  from  their  Jewish  brethren. 
It  was  as  "Christians,"  Messianists,  that  they  were 
known.  This  they  had  kept  of  the  old  religion,  and  it 
seemed  to  be  the  substance  of  the  new.  The  messianic 
faith  they  even  amplified  and  heightened,  while  the 
messianic  hopes  and  fancies  that  possessed  them  grew 
more  ardent  and  extravagant  than  ever.  This  dominating 
belief  that  Jesus  is  the  Messiah  gives  unity  and  form  to 
that  compilation  of  detached  traditions  which  we  have  in 
the  gospel  of  Mark,  and  this  is  the  thesis  for  which  the 
whole  gospel  is  an  argument.  The  story  of  Jesus  moves 
through  the  medium  of  messianism,  and  his  person  is 
enveloped  in  it  from  end  to  end.  The  Synoptic  gospels 
are  not  historic  records  in  the  modern  sense,  and  they  do 
not  fulfil  the  conditions  of  biography  as  we  understand  it. 
The  gospels  were  written  for  the  edification  of  the  faithful 
and  as  an  apologetic  for  Christianity,  above  all  for  the 
Messiah's  death.  That  Jesus  was  the  Messiah  was  argued 
from  his  resurrection,  attested  by  his  disciples,  but 
complete  proof  could  only  be  furnished  by  the  Parousia, 
and  hence  the  centre  of  gravity  of  the  Christian  faith  was 
transferred  to  its  eschatology.  "The  chief  interest  of 
the  Synoptic  writers  is  eschatological "  writes  Professor 
Mathews,  and  how  they  re- worked  their  original  material 
in  a  messianic  sense  is  shown  in  detail  by  this  conservative 
scholar.1  "The  Synoptists  did  not  describe  the  Jesus  of 
real  life,  but  the  Christ  as  he  appeared  to  the  hearts  of  his 
followers."2  They  "represent  the  point  of  view  of  the 
Church  during  the  last  quarter  of  the  first  century."3 

"The  religious  reflection  of  the  early  Christian  congre- 
gations moved  entirely  in  the  direction  of  interpreting  and 
arranging  the  preceding  earth-life  of  Jesus  in  the  light  of 

1  Mathews,  op.  cit.,  224-236. 

a  Julicher,  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament,  371. 

3  Mathews,  ut  sup. 


74  Messianism 

their  newly  won  belief  in  his  heavenly  Messiahship."1 
We  are  forced  to  recognize  that  what  the  traditions  about 
Jesus  give  us  is  first  of  all  the  ideas  and  sentiments  of  those 
who  give  us  the  traditions.2  The  belief  of  the  primitive 
Church  stands  between  us  and  Jesus  as  we  read  the 
gospels.  The  conceptions  of  the  early  Christians  with 
regard  to  the  Christ,  their  notions  concerning  his  death  and 
resurrection,  their  views  of  the  messianic  kingdom  and  the 
future  world,  we  gather  without  difficulty;  but  how  Jesus 
stood  toward  these  conceptions  and  views  is  much  less 
clear.  Wernle  remarks: 

All  the  thoughts  of  Jesus  concerning  the  import  of  his 
death  and  the  need  of  it  are,  as  we  meet  them,  thoughts  of  the 
primitive  community:  it  is  these  only  that  we  actually  know. 
Whether  it  was  Jesus  who  first  put  them  forth  is  precisely  our 
question.3 

And  the  same  question  arises  in  regard  to  the  messianic  be- 
lief. In  Matt,  xxiv  and  its  parallels  we  find  the  Messiah 
discoursing  on  the  end  of  the  world  and  his  coming  in  the 
clouds  of  heaven,  but  since  the  searching  criticism  of  Colani 
was  turned  upon  these  chapters  fifty  years  ago,  it  has  been 
well  established  that  not  one  word  in  them  was  the  utter- 
ance of  Jesus.  As  the  text  betrays  by  its  caution  "let 
him  that  readeth  understand,"  we  have  to  do  here  with 
a  writing,  not  a  spoken  discourse.  This  "synoptic 
apocalypse"  conies  from  an  Aramaic  original,  composed 
during  the  siege  of  Jerusalem,  and  clearly  reflecting  the 
experiences  of  the  year  68.  It  may  be  the  "oracle"  to 

1  Pfleiderer,  Christian  Origins,  141. 

2  "Si  les  ide"es  de  Je*sus  n'ont  tonjours  pas  e'te'  la  regie  des  conceptions  de 
ses  disciples,  elles  seront  au  moins  la  n6tre  dans  I'appr^ciation  de  ces  der- 
nieres."    Reuss,  Histoire  de  la  Theologie  Chretienne  i,  159. 

3  Wernle,  The  Sources  of  our  Knowledge  of  the  Life  of  Jesus,  157. 


Messianism  75 

which  Eusebius  refers  as  inciting  the  Christians'  flight  to 
Pella,  but  more  probably  Wellhausen  is  right  in  regarding 
it  as  a  Jewish  product,  appropriated  in  a  Greek  translation 
to  Christian  use,  and  finally  incorporated  in  the  gospel  of 
Matthew,  in  the  reign  of  Trajan,  early  in  the  second 
century,  whence  it  found  its  way  into  Mark  and  Luke. 
The  case  against  this  interpolation  is  abundantly  made  out, 
and  modern  scholarship  will  respond  to  the  demand  for 
proof. x 

But  let  us  turn  to  another  view  of  the  question,  and  ask 
ourselves  what  we  are  called  on  to  believe  if  we  accept  this 
vision  of  things  to  come  as  a  genuine  discourse  of  Jesus. 
The  messianism  of  the  gospels  comes  in  a  summary  state- 
ment to  this :  Before  the  generation  now  living  shall  pass 
away  the  existing  order  of  the  world  will  come  to  an  end  in 
a  sudden  catastrophe  announced  by  the  most  extraor- 
dinary portents  and  convulsions  of  nature,  and  preceded 
by  terrible  calamities.  Then  the  Messiah  will  appear  in 
glory,  coming  in  the  clouds  of  heaven  with  an  escort  of 
angels  and  the  sound  of  trumpets,  and  will  summon  the 
dead  to  rise  from  the  underworld  and  take  their  place 
with  the  living  before  his  throne  of  judgment.  This 
"judgment"  will  divide  men  into  two  categories  according 
to  the  deeds  of  their  life.  The  righteous  will  be  admitted 
to  a  feast  presided  over  by  Abraham,  and  the  Apostles 
will  be  enthroned  as  judges  of  the  twelve  tribes  of  Israel. 
The  wicked  will  be  cast  into  Gehenna,  a  place  of  darkness, 
of  fire  and  the  undying  worm ;  and  the  torments  of  the  one 
and  the  joys  of  the  other  will  be  alike  without  end.  These 
pictures  and  predictions  are  plain  and  simple;  there  is  no 

1  In  the  oldest  gospel  the  interpolation  occurs  between  the  question 
(Mark  xiii,  4):  "When  shall  these  things  be?"  and  the  answer  (32)  "of 
that  day  and  hour  knoweth  no  man, " — an  answer  which  follows  directly  in 
naive  contradiction  on  the  solemn  declaration,  "This  generation  shall  not 
pass  till  all  these  things  be  done." 


76  Messianism 

sign  of  any  figurative  sense;  the  writers  mean  them  to  be 
taken  literally  as  matters  of  fact. 

So  then :  Jesus,  whose  Good  Tidings  told  of  the  heavenly 
Father  and  forgiveness  of  sin,  who  called  men  to  the  higher 
righteousness  of  love  and  a  new  life  in  union  with  the 
Divine,  whose  religion  was  so  inward  and  spiritual,  so 
pure  from  all  earthly  alloy — crowns  all  with  an  eschatology 
so  gross  and  so  grotesque !  Jesus,  whose  revelation  of  God 
and  of  man  was  so  completely  new,  of  whom  they  said, 
" Never  man  spoke  like  this  man" — can  only  repeat  when 
he  touches  on  mankind's  destiny  what  the  vulgarest  rabbi 
had  long  been  preaching  in  the  synagogue!  Jesus,  who 
knew  so  well  the  heart  of  man  and  the  slow  pace  of  human 
progress,  who,  as  I  have  said,  read  the  ways  of  God  in  the 
ways  of  nature,  wide,  gradual,  uniform  and  sure,  whose 
outlook  on  the  world  was  ever  sane,  calm,  clear-eyed — 
yields  to  these  fantastic  dreams  of  his  misguided  people, 
and  solemnly  predicts  as  close  at  hand  a  startling  series  of 
preternatural  events  which  have  never  come  to  pass !  One 
who  can  believe  that  will  believe  anything. 

The  reaction  against  orthodox  Christology  on  the  part 
of  some  who  have  traced  out  the  history  of  its  development 
has  led  them  to  lay  stress  upon  the  heredity  and  environ- 
ment of  the  Galilean  Prophet,  to  regard  him  as  subject  to 
the  influences  affecting  his  land  and  time,  and  sharing  the 
ideas,  beliefs  and  sentiments  of  other  pious  Jews.  In  so 
far  as  this  view  tends  to  give  reality  and  defmiteness  to 
the  humanity  of  Jesus,  which  in  the  minds  of  many  has 
been  overshadowed  by  his  divinity  and  suffered  eclipse, 
it  has  been  of  service;  but  reactionary  tendencies  are  apt 
to  lead  too  far,  and  if  we  miss  the  essential  in  our  emphasis 
upon  the  accidental,  if  we  look  upon  the  hero  with  the 
eyes  of  the  valet  and  to  us  Jesus  appears  an  ordinary 
mortal,  on  a  level  with  his  countrymen,  then  the  effect  of 
his  life  and  work,  the  deep  impress  of  his  personality  upon 


Messianism  77 

the  world  are  facts  that  remain  unaccounted  for.  It  is 
not  in  the  aspects  of  his  mind,  in  the  circle  of  his  thoughts, 
that  liken  him  to  other  Jews  that  we  find  a  true  estimate 
of  Jesus,  but  in  those  that  differentiate  him,  those  that 
belong  to  himself  alone.  And  some  of  these  were  in- 
compatible with  current  popular  ideas.  To  say,  as 
commonly  it  is  said,  that  he  shared  the  messianic  expec- 
tations of  the  time  is  blindness  to  what  is  capitally  dis- 
tinctive of  his  Gospel.  If  Jesus  had  taken  himself  to  be 
the  Jewish  Messiah  there  never  would  have  been  a  Chris- 
tian religion.  When  the  generations  passed  and  there  was 
no  parousia,  Christianity  did  not  collapse  and  disappear 
like  a  dream  from  the  world,  because,  overlaid  though  it 
was  with  messianic  perversions,  there  lived  on  at  its  heart 
the  spirit  of  the  life  of  Jesus  and  the  eternal  truths  he 
taught  mankind. 

It  is  true  it  was  the  coming  of  a  Kingdom  of  God  that 
he  proclaimed,  but  he  adopted  that  term  of  the  Jewish 
hope  to  give  it  an  entirely  new  meaning.  He  took  it  as  a 
setting  or  vehicle  for  his  own  ideas,  and  it  had  no  more  to 
do  with  his  teaching  than  that  it  helped  him  to  express 
those  ideas;  for  a  teacher  of  new  truth  must  speak  the 
language  of  the  people  and  make  use  of  the  conceptions 
and  symbols  they  are  familiar  with  if  he  would  gain  a 
hearing.  The  Kingdom  of  God,  or  eternal  life — we  find 
in  Mark's  gospel  that  these  are  synonyms — was  the  inward 
state  and  character  of  the  transformed  soul  in  immediate 
communion  with  the  heavenly  Father,  and  the  fellowship 
in  brotherhood  of  such  transformed  souls.  It  was  an 
inward  and  spiritual  kingdom,  having  its  seat  in  the  hearts 
of  men,  not  one  to  be  set  up  in  visible  outwardness,  and 
the  negation  of  that  Jewish  conception  is  the  essential 
novelty  of  the  Gospel  teaching.  Now  if  Jesus  believed 
in  the  coming  of  a  Messiah,  what  kind  of  a  Messiah  was  it 
that  he  must  have  believed  in?  It  is  evident  that  the 


78  Messianism 

conception  of  the  Messiah  corresponds  to  that  of  the 
messianic  kingdom,  that  the  two  belong  together;  and  if 
Jesus  did  not  accept  the  people's  notion  of  the  kingdom, 
he  could  not  have  accepted  their  notion  of  the  Messiah. 
If  the  hope  of  a  kingdom  which  should  fall  like  a  thunder- 
bolt from  heaven,  crushing  human  resistance  without 
conquering  human  souls,  and  adjudging  to  moral  excel- 
lence a  grossly  material  reward — if  this  seemed  to  Jesus, 
what  it  was,  a  regrettable  delusion,  then  the  corresponding 
hope  of  a  Messiah,  the  national  hero  who  in  the  power  of 
Jehovah  should  establish  the  universal  dominion  of  the 
chosen  people  and  wreak  a  terrible  vengeance  on  its 
enemies — this  was  equally  a  delusion.  On  the  other  hand 
if  in  his  view  of  it  the  kingdom  was  of  a  purely  spiritual 
nature,  such  in  his  view  of  it  must  be  the  character  of  the 
Messiah.  He  could  be  no  other  than  a  preacher  of  truth,  a 
reformer  of  tradition,  a  revealer  of  the  Father,  a  friend  of 
sinners,  an  evangelist  to  the  poor,  an  initiator  of  a  peaceful 
religious  revolution,  the  founder  of  a  Kingdom  of  God  in 
the  souls  of  men  whose  unlimited  power  of  expansion 
would  be  subject  to  that  law  of  continuity,  of  inward 
development  and  organic  growth  which  is  everywhere  the 
method  of  divine  action.  Such  a  Messiah  as  this  Jesus 
was,  the  Messiah  of  his  own  Kingdom,  and  this  was 
heaven  wide  from  the  Messiah  of  the  Jews.  He  could  not 
claim  nor  accept  the  title  of  Messiah  unless  the  meaning 
of  that  title  were  utterly  transformed. 

And  so  the  question  comes  to  be  whether  Jesus  assumed 
to  be  the  Messiah  in  his  own  sense,  a  sense  which  had 
nothing  in  common  with  that  of  Jewish  or  Christian 
eschatology,  or  whether  he  never  assumed  to  be  the 
Messiah  in  any  sense  whatever.  If  we  adopt  the  former 
supposition  it  appears  that  Jesus  undertook  the  difficult 
task  of  substituting  one  Messiah  for  another  in  the  minds 
of  the  people,  of  transforming  the  anointed  champion  of 


Messianism  79 

Jehovah  into  the  preacher  of  spiritual  truth  and  righteous- 
ness,— and  that  he  failed  in  the  undertaking.     For  indeed 
failure  was  inevitable.     The   Kingdom  of  God,  as  the 
general  notion  of  Israel's  divinely  ordered  future,  might  be 
spoken  of  in  general  terms ;  it  was  a  plastic  conception  and 
might  be  represented  as  signifying  the  regeneration  of 
human  life  through  the  power  of  latent  spiritual  principles. 
The  Messiah,  on  the  other  hand,  was  a  definite  conception 
not  to  be  dealt  with  in  this  manner.     To  explain  it  in  a 
spiritual  sense  was  to  explain  it  away.     The  Messiah  was 
an  individual.     Jesus  could  not  merely  say,  the  Messiah  is 
to  be  understood  as  such  and  such  a  one;  as  the  prophet 
of  the  Kingdom  he  had  to  say  in  effect,  if  he  spoke  of  him 
at  all,  the  Messiah  is  myself.     And  once  he  took  that 
name  it  would  be  scarcely  possible  to  bring  the  people  to 
take  it  in  his  sense,  it  was  so  closely  bound  to  theirs.     If 
they  accorded  him  the  title  of  Messiah  they  would  expect 
him  to  assume  the  r61e  assigned  to  that  personage  and 
head  a  rising  against  the  Romans,  and  on  his  refusal  they 
would  reject  him  for  an  impostor.     With  this  gulf  of 
difference  between  him  and  the  people  he  could  not  claim 
to  be  a  Messiah  of  any  kind  without  risking  a  fatal  mis- 
understanding.    Nothing  could  be  more  imprudent  than 
to  suffer  this  inflammatory  word  to  be  thrown  out  upon 
the  common  air  and  caught  up  as  a  revolutionary  watch- 
word.    His  only  course  was  gradually  to  win  acceptance 
as  the  Messiah  that  he  really  was  through  the  effect  of  his 
Gospel  and  of  his  personality  on  men's  hearts  and  minds. 
For  this  Jesus  waited  and  hoped,  but  his  success  was 
limited  and  doubtful.  JVhen  after  the  crisis  in  Galilee,  on 
the  eve  of  the  fatal  journey  to  Jerusalem,  he  asked  the 
disciples  whom  the  people  took  him  to  be,  they  said, 
John  the  Baptist,  or  one  of  the  prophets,  risen  from  the 
dead.     To  the  question,  whom  say  ye  that  I  am?  they 
replied,  thou  art  the  Christ.     This  acknowledgment  was 


8o  Messianism 

something;  it  witnessed  to  the  deep  impression  he  had 
made  upon  these  few  who  had  followed  him  with  faithful 
affection,  if  with  scant  intelligence,  captivated  by  the 
strength  and  sweetness  of  his  heroic  soul.  But  this  was 
not  to  recognise  in  him  a  purely  spiritual  Messiah.  For 
them  he  was  quite  simply  the  Messiah;  to  the  last,  they 
were  haunted  by  the  apocalyptic  dream.  And  so  Jesus 
charged  them  not  to  proclaim  him  as  the  Christ,  for  that 
would  only  be  to  effect  his  identification  with  the  popular 
ideal,  the  thing  he  sought  to  avoid.  Soon,  however,  it  is 
said,  he  was  forced  to  put  all  to  the  touch.  To  gain  at 
Jerusalem  a  hearing  for  the  Gospel  of  the  Kingdom  and 
recognition  of  the  authority  of  his  message  it  was  indis- 
pensable, in  view  of  the  condition  of  the  popular  mind,  to 
assume  at  all  hazards  the  character  of  the  Messiah.  And 
so  now  it  became  an  urgent  necessity  to  bring  his  followers 
to  see  in  him,  in  the  prophet  of  the  spiritual  kingdom  just 
as  they  knew  him,  the  only  real  Messiah.  The  time  was 
too  short.  Jesus  did  not  live  long  enough  to  effect  that 
transformation  of  his  disciples'  beliefs  and  hopes  which 
would  have  freed  their  religion  from  the  delusions  of 
Jewish  messianism  and  cleared  his  own  figure  from  the 
veiling  haze  of  unreality  through  which  posterity  was  to 
view  it. 

So  the  matter  appears  to  stand  if  we  adopt  the  supposi- 
tion that  Jesus  assumed  to  be  the  Messiah  in  a  sense  of  his 
own,  to  be  the  Messiah  of  his  own  spiritual  kingdom.  It  is 
a  view  that  seems  open  to  one  somewhat  serious  objection. 
To  suppose  that  Jesus  for  any  reason  or  with  any  purpose 
accepted  a  title  without  explaining  that  he  only  accepted 
it  in  a  sense  other  than  that  in  which  it  was  given, — that 
he  silently  allowed  the  people  to  call  him  by  a  name  to 
which  they  attached  a  signification  altogether  different 
from  that  which  lay  in  his  own  mind,  is  to  charge  him 
with  a  lack  of  openness,  almost  amounting  to  duplicity, 


Messianism  81 

scarcely  in  keeping  with  the  character  of  an  honest  man 
and  no  less  than  shocking  to  our  conception  of  the  charac- 
ter of  Jesus. 

And  now  how  is  it  with  the  alternative  supposition  that 
he  never  claimed  to  be  the  Messiah  at  all?  When  Jesus 
began  his  preaching  at  Capernaum  what  he  declared  was 
not  that  the  Messiah  had  come  and  that  he  was  the 
Messiah,  but  that  the  Kingdom  of  God  was  at  hand.  We 
find  that  throughout  the  Galilean  ministry  he  never 
assumed  any  messianic  title,  nor  asserted  any  messianic 
claim,  and  promptly  silenced  the  demoniacs  when  they 
hailed  him  as  Messiah.1  These  are  facts  not  satisfac- 
torily explained  as  due  to  the  Messiah's  wish  to  maintain 
his  incognito.  It  is  hard  to  find  any  other  than  the  simple 
explanation  that  we  have  here  the  survival  of  a  primitive 
tradition  that  Jesus  never  made  any  pretension  to  Messiah- 
ship,  a  tradition  too  old  and  firmly  rooted  to  disappear. 
That  this  tradition  finds  admission  in  narratives  imbued 
with  the  conviction  which  it  contradicts  is  the  best 
evidence  that  it  transmits  the  fact  of  history.  Further- 
more, at  this  time  the  expectation  of  a  personal  Messiah 
was  of  comparatively  recent  origin  and  was  far  from  uni- 
versal. Neither  the  Book  of  Jubilees  nor  the  Assumption 
of  Moses  nor  the  Testaments  of  the  Twelve  Patriarchs,  all 
dating  from  about  the  beginning  of  our  era,  make  any 
mention  of  a  Messiah.  Although  the  fancy  of  the  early 
Church  depicted  John  as  the  herald  of  its  Christ — ignoring 

1  It  has  been  said  that  since  the  demoniacs  who  were  supposed  to  be 
possessed  by  evil  spirits  of  a  superior  order  of  intelligence,  were  in  fact 
lunatics  and  epileptics,  if  we  accept  their  testimony  we  confess  that  the 
Messiahship  of  Jesus  was  an  idea  that  presented  itself  more  readily  to  insane 
brains  than  sane  ones,  and  having  been  suggested  by  madmen  spread  from 
them  to  the  disciples.  The  only  escape  from  this  unpleasing  position  lies 
in  the  admission  that  these  narratives  are  not  historical,  but  belong  to  the 
mass  of  legendary  additions  which  early  grew  up  in  the  Christian  church. 
Cf.  W.  R.  Greg,  The  Creed  of  Christendom,  208. 
6 


82  Messianism 

their  actual  relations,  clearly  defined  for  us  in  Matt,  xi — 
the  fact  seems  to  be  that  he  followed  the  last  of  the 
prophets  in  announcing  the  coming  of  Jehovah  himself  to 
establish  his  kingdom.  It  is  safe  to  say  that  when  Jesus 
spoke  of  a  Kingdom  of  God  which  should  know  no  other 
ruler,  a  society  where  all  men  should  be  equal  and  none 
should  exercise  lordship  and  authority  over  his  fellows,  this 
idea  of  a  kingdom  without  a  Messiah  was  by  no  means  a 
novelty.  It  would  seem  then  that  the  endeavor  to  win 
acceptance  as  a  Messiah  of  a  totally  different  type  from 
that  of  the  popular  expectation  was  as  needless  as  it  was 
difficult,  was  indeed  only  to  court  the  needless  difficulty 
of  an  added  complication.  Jesus  spoke  as  the  prophet  of 
the  kingdom  and  as  a  prophet  he  was  regarded  by  the 
people.1  To  say  that  as  such  he  was  the  Messiah  could 
be  no  help,  but  almost  certainly  a  serious  hindrance  to 
the  preaching  of  the  Gospel.  And  that  was  what  he 
cared  about — the  heavenly  Father,  the  metanoia,  the 
righteousness  of  love — not  to  reform  the  conception  of 
the  Messiah  or  to  associate  himself  with  the  reformed 
conception.  It  has  been  said  that  if  Jesus  had  not  pro- 
claimed himself  the  Messiah  his  work  would  have  re- 
mained incomplete,  for  he  would  have  left  the  people  still 
expecting  some  successor  to  appear  and  establish  the 
messianic  kingdom.  This  is  not  convincing.  If  he  could 
bring  the  people  to  understand  the  kingdom  in  his  inward 
and  spiritual  sense,  their  notion  of  the  Messiah  would  go 
the  way  of  their  old  notion  of  a  material  kingdom  to  which 
it  was  tied  and  which  they  would  have  abandoned.  The 
issue  of  his  ministry  turned  on  this,  his  bringing  the  people 
to  such  an  understanding.  Now  to  this  end  he  invoked  no 
extraneous  authentication  of  his  Gospel,  but  left  it  to 
authenticate  itself.  He  trusted  all  to  the  living  truth  of  his 

1  Matt,  xiii,  57;  xxi,  11-46;  Mk.  vi,  4;  xi,  32;  Lk.  iv,  24;  vii,  16;  xiii,  33; 
xxiv,  19. 


Messianism  83 

message  and  the  power  of  its  appeal  to  men.  If  this  was 
the  method  of  his  deliberate  choice,  why  should  he  change 
it?  If  in  Galilee  to  assume  Messiahship  was  nowise 
necessary  to  the  preaching  of  his  kingdom,  why  should  it 
be  a  necessity  to  the  same  preaching  in  Jerusalem?  But, 
it  may  be  said,  he  had  failed  in  Galilee  and  this  failure 
dictated  a  change  of  method.  The  answer  is  that  such  a 
change  meant  a  surrender  of  principle  which  would  have 
been  the  completest  failure  of  all.  Jesus  came,  as  the 
fourth  gospel  makes  him  say,  to  bear  witness  to  the  truth, 
to  commend  it  to  the  free  acceptance  of  men's  personal 
insight  and  conviction.  This  free  acceptance  was  essential 
to  the  purpose  of  his  mission.  If  his  words  should  be 
received  as  true  because  uttered  by  the  Messiah,  or  for 
any  reason  other  than  their  own  self-evidencing  power, 
their  truth  could  not  be  known.  For  they  were  words  of 
eternal  life,  of  spiritual  truth,  which  cannot  be  passively 
received  at  second  hand  in  deference  to  authority,  because 
it  is  not  of  a  nature  to  be  given,  and  it  is  nothing  to  a  man 
until  he  himself  makes  it  his  own. 

That  Jesus  claimed  to  be  Messiah  is  an  affirmative 
proposition  and  as  such  assumes  the  burden  of  proof.  It 
can  hardly  be  said  that  this  proof  is  furnished  by  the 
evidence  of  the  synoptic  gospels.  Let  us  take  first  the 
account  of  Jesus'  messianic  entry  into  Jerusalem,  seated 
upon  an  ass  which  he  had  sent  f<7»r;  and  surrounded  by  an 
enthusiastic  multitude  hailing  him  as  the  Son  of  David. 
All  this  was  done,  our  first  gospel  tells  us,  repeating  its 
habitual  formula,  that  it  might  be  fulfilled  which  was 
spoken  by  the  prophet.  A  passage  in  the  book  of  Zech- 
ariah  in  which  a  King  enters  Jerusalem  riding  an  ass  was 
misinterpreted  by  the  writer  as  referring  to  the  Messiah; 
but  not  understanding  the  parallelism,  or  repetition, 
peculiar  to  Hebrew  poetry,  he  added  an  ass's  colt  and 
made  the  Messiah  ride  on  both.  (Matt,  xx,  7.)  That 


84  Messianism 

we  have  here  a  reading  back  of  the  messianic  beliefs  of  the 
first  Christians  into  the  record  of  the  Master's  life  is 
evident  from  the  fact  that  once  Jesus  is  in  the  city  the 
sensational  entry  melts  into  thin  air  as  though  it  had  not 
been.  When  the  people  ask,  Who  is  this?  his  followers 
reply,  This  is  Jesus,  the  prophet  of  Nazareth.  His  first 
action  which  was  rightly  understood  to  be  an  attack  upon 
the  sacrificial  system — and  to  which  his  death  at  the  hands 
of  the  incensed  hierarchy  was  directly  due — seems  quite 
devoid  of  a  messianic  significance,  but  is  in  obvious  accord 
with  the  spirit  of  the  old  prophets  in  their  conflict  with 
ritualism;  and  to  the  Sadducees'  demand  by  what  author- 
ity he  disturbed  the  peace  of  the  temple,  he  replied  in  effect 
by  the  authority  of  a  prophet,  by  such  as  that  of  John 
the  Baptist.  Throughout  the  exciting  discussions  of  these 
last  days  there  is  no  hint  that  anyone  dreams  of  taking 
him  for  the  Messiah  or  for  a  messianic  pretender.  As  to 
the  moral  impossibility  of  this  messianic  entry  Prof. 
Schmidt  writes  as  follows : 

That  Jesus  should  have  suddenly  changed  his  whole  view 
of  life  and  his  attitude  toward  the  royalist  movement,  that  he 
should  have  sacrificed  his  prophetic  ministry  conceived  in  so 
lofty  a  spirit  to  fan  the  flames  of  a  political  insurrection,  that 
the  man  whose  convictions  had  led  him  to  break  with  funda- 
mental principles  of  the  Law  at  the  risk  of  reputation  and  life, 
and  had  resisted  as  a  satanic  temptation  the  idea  of  marching 
to  power  by  the  means  of  an  aspirant  to  a  throne,  should  have 
deliberately  set  about  to  arrange  the  details  of  a  sensational 
entry  into  Jerusalem  in  accordance  with  a  misunderstood 
prophetic  passage,  is  as  inconceivable  as  the  development  of 
the  story  is  easy  to  explain.  The  death  on  Calvary  was  not 
so  tragic  as  such  a  surrender  of  his  ideal  would  have  been.1 

1  Schmidt,  op.  cit.,  281.  With  this  F.  W.  Newman  agrees  in  principle 
while  taking  a  different  view  of  the  facts.  In  a  tract  on  "  The  True  Tempta- 
tion of  Jesus"  he  writes:  "It  comes  before  me  as  a  certain  fact  that  the 


Messianism  85 

We  come  next  to  the  trial  scene  following  the  capture  in 
Gethsemane,  where  we  read  that  Jesus  acknowledged  his 
Messiahship  in  answer  to  the  high-priest's  question,  and 
thereupon  was  condemned  for  blasphemy.  It  must  not 
be  overlooked  that  we  have  no  means  of  knowing  what 
took  place  on  this  occasion.  The  original  sources  of  the 
gospel  narrative  close  at  the  moment  of  Jesus'  arrest, 
when  "all  the  disciples  forsook  him  and  fled, "  and  thence- 
forward the  evangelists  are  dependent  on  tradition,  whose 
uncertainty  is  reflected  in  the  diversity  of  view  that  ob- 
tains among  scholars  as  to  the  probable  course  of  events. 
What  was  said  on  either  side  at  the  private  examination 
in  the  house  of  the  high-priest,  or  at  the  session  of  the 
Sanhedrim  in  the  morning — if  in  such  wise  we  interpret 
the  accounts  in  Matthew  and  Mark  of  two  successive 
meetings  of  the  Council — can  only  have  been  a  matter  of 
conjecture  on  the  part  of  Jesus'  followers,  and  they  would 
naturally  assume  that  he  must  have  been  asked  on  oath 
whether  he  was  the  Messiah.  That  the  account  of  these 
proceedings  is  not  to  be  trusted  is  shown  by  the  alleged 
effect  of  Jesus'  declaration.  It  was  no  crime  then  or 
afterward  to  claim  to  be  the  Messiah — as  appears  from  the 
great  Rabbi  Akiba's  enthusiastic :  acceptance  in  that 
character  of  Simon  named  Bar-Kokeba.  Still  less  could 
any  Jewish  court  have  constructed  that  claim  into  a 
blasphemy.  "A  rigid  monotheism  rendered  it  impossible 
for  the  Jewish  Messiah  to  be  more  than  a  man,"  writes 
Schmidt  (op.  tit.,  92).  And  Holtzmann  remarks  (The 
Life  of  Jesus,  477) : 

Jesus'  belief  that  he  was  the  Messiah  might  be  attributed 
to  insanity  or  to  foolish  fancy;  it  could  not  be  considered 
blasphemous  so  long  as  it  was  the  general  opinion  that  a  man 
born  of  woman  would  one  day  stand  forth  as  the  Messiah. 

true  temptation  of  Jesus  was  the  whisper  made  to  him,  Are  you  not  possibly 
the  Messiah?    And  by  it  the  legendary  devil  overcame  him." 


86  Messianism 

The  cry  of  blasphemy  is  simply  an  anachronism.  When 
the  synoptic  gospels  were  written  the  terms  Son  of  Man, 
Son  of  God,  Son  of  the  Blessed  were  synonymous,  or 
tending  to  become  so,  and  beginning  to  convey  the  mean- 
ing of  divinity,  so  that  the  Christians  would  naturally 
suppose  that  their  Lord  had  been  charged  with  blasphemy. 
It  is  plain  that  we  have  here  a  narrative  of  late  date  and 
historically  valueless.  The  real  offence  of  Jesus,  as  we 
know  from  his  whole  history,  had  no  concern  with  mes- 
sianic pretensions;  it  was  his  revolutionary  teaching,  the 
antagonism  of  his  Gospel  to  the  religious  system  of  the 
Temple  and  the  Law. x 

Finally  let  us  return  to  the  famous  colloquy  at  Caesarea 
Philippi.  A  text  scarcely  gives  its  true  meaning  if  it  be 
detached  from  its  context,  and  so  this  episode  is  to  be 
interpreted  in  the  light  of  the  general  conclusions  we  are 
brought  to  by  a  study  of  Jesus'  whole  career;  in  that  light 
it  may  wear  a  new  aspect  to  the  eyes  of  some.  Driven 
from  Galilee,  Jesus  had  set  his  face  to  go  to  Jerusalem, 
determined  to  carry  the  Gospel  message  into  the  Holy 
City  and  abide  the  issue.  He  knew  what  to  expect  from 

1  So  much  may  be  said  of  Jesus'  alleged  acknowledgment  of  his  Messiah- 
ship,  but  possibly  we  may  go  further  and  reject  the  whole  story  altogether. 
It  is  more  than  doubtful  whether  there  was  any  trial,  any  meeting  of  the 
Sanhedrim,  any  questioning  of  Jesus  whatever.  As  J.  ReVille  points  out 
(Le  Quatritme  Evangile,  269):  "The  alleged  sessions  of  the  Sanhedrim 
are  in  the  highest  degree  improbable.  The  arrest  of  Jesus  is  effected  by  a 
priestly  plot,  without  employment  of  any  legal  forms  or  methods.  The  priests 
of  Jerusalem  know  their  people.  All  there  is  to  do  is  to  put  before  them  the 
fait  accompli — to  lay  hold  of  Jesus  by  surprise  and  show  him  a  prisoner, 
utterly  discredited  and  deserted  even  by  his  followers — and  they  will  not 
have  to  fear  any  popular  movement  on  his  behalf.  For  this  there  is  no 
need  of  any  judgment  of  the  Sanhedrim."  In  this  view  of  the  case  Jesus 
is  hurried  from  Gethsemane  to  the  high  priest's  palace,  where  a  few  privy 
to  the  plot  are  gathered  to  await  its  issue,  kept  under  guard  till  the  morning 
and  then  taken  before  Pilate  and  denounced  as  an  inciter  of  sedition 
(Luke  xxiii,  2  and  5)  or  accused  of  "many  things"  (Matt,  xxvii,  13; 
Mark  xv,  3). 


Messianism  87 

Scribes  and  Pharisees,  but  what  of  the  added  danger  in  the 
messianic  excitement?  To  measure  its  extent  and  learn 
what  he  had  to  cope  with  he  asked  his  disciples  what  men 
were  saying  about  him.  The  reply  was  fairly  reassuring, 
but  there  remained  perhaps  a  more  serious  danger;  what 
did  they  think  of  him  themselves?  It  is  clear  that  up  to 
this  date,  seventeen  days  before  his  death,  no  word  had 
ever  been  breathed  about  his  Messiahship  either  in  popular 
rumour  or  within  the  inner  circle  of  his  followers.  Now  for 
the  first  time  Peter  ventures  to  affirm  it.  If  he  thought  a 
leading  question  had  been  put  to  him  to  prompt  the  de- 
sired answer,  it  was  not  the  first  time  he  had  failed  to  read 
the  mind  of  Jesus,  but  never  had  he  been  more  quickly 
undeceived.  If  his  impulsive  declaration  was  meant  to 
force  his  Master's  hand  and  oblige  him  to  proclaim  him- 
self the  king  that  should  come,  he  was  grievously  dis- 
appointed. Jesus  would  not  assume  that  title ;  he  forbade 
his  disciples  to  say  that  he  was  the  Messiah;  he  would  not 
have  the  people  led  to  regard  him  as  such.  Why,  if  he 
was  the  Messiah  ?  Surely  he  was  bound  to  declare  himself. 
His  Messiahship  was  not  a  private  dignity  that  could  be 
clandestinely  held.  It  was  the  divine  message  with  which 
he  was  charged,  and  to  keep  it  out  of  sight,  not  to  press  it 
insistently  upon  the  people,  would  be  a  simple  betrayal  of 
trust.  The  injunction  to  conceal  the  claim  is  inconsistent 
with  his  having  made  or  sanctioned  it.  So  much  is  clear 
from  what  has  been  permitted  to  remain  in  the  narrative ; 
what  more  he  may  have  said  to  disabuse  the  minds  of  his 
followers  and  bring  them  to  a  sense  of  his  real  character 
and  mission  we  can  only  surmise  from  a  statement  thickly 
overlaid  by  later  tradition.1  He  began  to  speak  of  the 

1  "  If  Peter  had  just  been  told  not  only  of  the  Cross  but  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion, could  he  have  deprecated  the  death  and  taken  no  notice  of  the  immor- 
tal glory  to  which  it  was  but  the  prelude  and  condition?"  Martineau, 
The  Seat  of  Authority  in  Religion,  350. 


88  Messianism 

prospective  issue  of  his  desperate  venture  and  the  likeli- 
hood that  he  would  meet  the  fate  of  so  many  a  prophet 
before  him.  When  Peter,  still  dazzled  by  his  messianic 
vision,  protested  against  the  foreboding  of  suffering  and 
death — so  evidently  a  disclaimer  of  the  pretension  he  had 
just  advanced — he  was  met  by  the  stern  rebuke,  "Get 
thee  behind  me,  Satan!  Thou  art  a  stumbling  block  to 
me,  for  thou  mindest  not  the  things  of  God  but  the  things 
of  men."  Peter  must  have  felt  his  assertion  to  be  re- 
pudiated. It  seems  impossible  not  to  see  the  intense 
anxiety  of  Jesus  to  put  a  stop  to  these  messianic  delusions. x 
Apart  from  the  objection  noted  above  it  is  not  of  vital 
importance  which  one  of  the  alternatives  considered  we 
accept,  since  neither  attributes  to  Jesus  the  wild  fancies 
of  his  countrymen.  Unhappily  it  is  these  that  ruled  the 
mind  of  primitive  Christianity. 


Through  that  one  word  Messiah  it  came  about  that  the 
whole  figure  of  Jesus  was  placed  within  the  framework  of  the 
Jewish  picture  of  the  things  to  come  that  lay  there  ready  to 
hand.  In  the  latter  no  change  was  made  whatever;  the  only 
addition  was  the  name  of  Jesus.  This  oldest  Christian  dogma 
is  nothing  but  the  filling  up  of  a  Jewish  outline  with  a  concrete 
name.  .  .  .  The  Jewish  faith  swallowed  up  the  Christian; 
"Jesus  the  Messiah"  is  a  Jewish  idea,  and  remains  such 
in  spite  of  all  the  new  meaning  put  into  the  conception.2 


How  is  it  that  the  definite  and  detailed  predictions  of  his  death  and  his 
resurrection  which  the  synoptists  put  into  the  mouth  of  Jesus  left  the  disciples 
so  utterly  unprepared  for  all  that  followed  the  arrest  in  the  Garden  that 
they  were  taken  by  surprise  and  scattered  in  dismay?  The  fourth  evan- 
gelist says  of  Peter  and  John  at  the  sepulchre  that  "as  yet  they  knew  not 
the  Scripture  that  he  must  rise  again  from  the  dead."  If  they  must  "know 
the  Scripture"  to  solve  the  puzzle  of  the  empty  grave,  they  could  hardly 
have  had  the  key  to  it  supplied  by  their  master's  distinct  announcements. 

1  Cp.  Schmidt,  op.  tit.,  277. 

*  Wernle,  The  Beginnings  of  Christianity,  i,  140. 


Messianism  89 

The  Christ  of  the  early  Church  was  indeed  substantially  the 
Messiah  of  the  Jews,  and  its  efforts  were  bent  on  so  ad- 
justing the  life  story  of  Jesus  to  the  messianic  ideal  as  to 
bring  the  two  into  a  satisfactory  unity.  The  difficulties 
encountered  were  overcome  by  the  prevalent  methods  of 
exegesis  which  made  it  easy  to  discover  Scriptural  warrant 
for  any  position  one  desired  to  maintain.  The  Messiah  of 
the  Jews  was  armed  with  irresistible  power  for  his  triumph 
over  the  nation's  enemies;  the  Messiah  of  the  Christians 
had  suffered  a  cruel  death  at  their  hands ;  but  this  was  the 
true  fulfilment  of  ancient  prediction  and  a  stumbling- 
block  only  to  ''fools  slow  of  heart  to  believe  all  that  the 
prophets  had  spoken."  The  Jewish  Messiah  was  still 
awaited;  the  Christian  had  come  and  gone;  but  a  second 
coming  could  readily  be  imagined,  and  expected  with  the 
more  eager  confidence  since  the  first  one  had  already 
taken  place. 

Upon  the  contention  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah  ensued 
the  long  controversy  with  the  Jews.  The  Christians 
appealed  to  the  Scriptures,  and  the9' whole  of  the  Old 
Testament  was  interpreted  as  prophetic  of  their  Messiah ; 
the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  calmly  asserts  that  "the  red  heifer 
in  Numbers  xix  is  the  Lord  Jesus."  A  bad  cause  was 
defended  by  worse  methods.  It  was  not  only  that  the 
apologists  went  to  the  extreme  in  their  employment  of  the 
arbitrary  methods  of  exegesis  generally  practiced,  more 
serious  was  the  flagrant  dishonesty  with  which  passages 
of  Scripture  were  altered,  perverted,  or  invented.  "All 
that  they  advance  is  figment,  feint,  and  fabrication.  He 
that  would  defend  Jesus  must  prove  his  claim  to  the  right 
titles,  and  must  care  as  little  as  possible  for  the  real  Jesus."  * 

The  scanty  records  of  their  faith  suffice  to  show  that  the 
first  Christians  continued  to  hold  to  the  apocalyptic 

1  For  a  full  account  of  the  Christological  controversy  see  Wernle,  op.  cit. 
ii,  33-53,  whence  the  above  is  taken. 


90  Messianism 

messianism  of  the  Pharisees  except  so  far  as  this  was 
affected  by  their  identification  of  Jesus  with  the  Christ.1 
They  believed  in  the  two  ages:  "this  age"  of  evil  and 
misery — which  was  under  the  dominion  of  Satan,  the 
"Prince  of  this  age" — and  "the  coming  age"  of  happiness 
and  glory  which  would  be  introduced  with  the  return  of 
the  Christ  from  heaven.  This  "parousia"  would  be  of  a 
sudden  and  without  warning,  and  was  expected  within  the 
lifetime  of  the  existing  generation.  It  would  be  followed 
by  the  judgment,  which  held  the  same  central  place  in 
Christian  thought  as  in  Pharisaism.  At  first  the  Christians 
held  the  orthodox  view  that  Jehovah  Himself  was  the 
judge;  the  bold  innovation  in  Jewish  messianism  which 
assigns  that  office  to  the  Messiah  is  due  to  Paul.2  The 

1  The  Pharisaic  ideas  were  largely  drawn  from  the  Persian  religion 
which  from  the  first  made  a  deep  impression  on  the  Jewish  mind.    While  its 
moral  earnestness  appealed  strongly  to  the  people  of  Jehovah,  its  treatment 
of  the  problem  of  evil  was  not  consistent  with  the  prophetic  conception 
of  Israel's  God  as  the  supreme  ruler  of  the  universe.    In  vain  however  had 
the  great  Prophet  of  the  Captivity  protested  against  the  dualistic  theory 
which  represented  the  history  of  the  world  as  a  contest  between  the  rival 
gods  of  good  and  evil  (Is.  xlv,  5-7).     Adopting  the  Persian  idea  of  an 
army  of  good  spirits  at  war  with  an  army  of  evil  ones,  the  Jew  beheld  Satan, 
who  appears  in  the  Book  of  Job  as  the  prosecuting  attorney  of  the  heavenly 
court,  invested  with  the  leadership  of  the  fallen  angels  and  sovereignty 
over  a  kingdom  of  evil,  and  employing  the  heathen  nations  as  subordinate 
allies  to  persecute  the  people  of  God.     The  Persian  cherished  the  hope  that 
in  some  remote  future  the  long  conflict  would  close  in  the  victory  of  good. 
When  the  time  limit  of  the  existing  order  should  be  reached  judgment 
would  be  pronounced  upon  the  world,  the  realm  of  hostile  spirits  destroyed, 
and  an  archangel  would  appear  to  bring  to  pass  the  resurrection  of  the  good 
and  the  creation  of  a  new  world  purified  from  evil.     Out  of  these  ideas 
arose  the  pictures  of  the  future  in  the  Jewish  apocalyptic. 

2  The  Messiah  appears  as  judge  in  the  "Similitudes"  of  the  book  of 
Enoch  (xxxvii-lxxi),  but  that  section  of  the  apocalypse,  which  calls  itself 
the  Second  Vision  of  Enoch,  is  admittedly  of  late  date — the  reign  of 
Domitian,  81-96  A.D. — and  it  is  not  the  work  of  one  hand.    In  the  original 
body  of  the  vision  God  alone  is  judge  and  there  is  no  Messiah.    This  work 
was  apparently  expanded  by  another  writer  who,  under  Christian  influence, 
introduced  the  doctrine  in  question,  which  only  appeared  to  be  rejected. 


Messianism  91 

kingdom  of  heaven,  whose  joys  were  the  reward  of  the 
righteous,  was  still  the  material  and  sensuous  kingdom  of 
the  Jewish  hope,  as  appears  for  example  from  the  pre- 
diction of  the  marvelous  grapes  which  Papias  ascribes 
to  Jesus — apparently  ignorant  that  it  was  to  be  found  in 
the  Apocalypse  of  Baruch.  That  Jews  only  should  gain 
admission  to  the  kingdom  was  the  conviction  of  the 
Jerusalem  church — though  Paulinism  of  course  held  to  the 
contrary — and  this  doubtless  included  the  current  belief 
as  to  the  subjugation  of  the  Gentile  world  to  the  glorified 
Jewish  state.  The  Pharisaic  doctrine  of  the  resurrection 
of  the  righteous  was  maintained  by  the  Christians,  and  the 
resurrection  of  Jesus,  by  which  he  was  manifested  as  the 
Messiah,  became  the  corner-stone  of  their  Apologetic. 
For  there  was  nothing  in  the  brief  ministry  of  the  Galilean 
prophet  to  lead  men  to  regard  him  as  the  expected  Mes- 
siah. It  was  evident  to  his  disciples  that  his  earthly  life 
was  no  part  of  his  messianic  career;  that  career  was  pros- 
pective and  its  work  lay  in  the  future, — except  in  so  far 
as  Jesus  had  employed  the  interval  between  his  death  and 
resurrection  in  preaching  to  '  *  the  spirits  in  prison, ' ' 
according  to  the  peculiar  dictum  of  an  unknown  writer 
which  was  embodied  in  the  creed  of  the  later  Church.1 

The  author  of  Fourth  Ezra  enters  a  vigorous  protest  against  the  sacrilegious 
fancy  that  Jehovah  would  delegate  to  a  creature  his  divine  prerogative. 

1 1  Peter  iii,  19.  The  doctrine  of  the  Descent  into  Hell  does  not  appear 
elsewhere  in  the  New  Testament,  but  is  often  found  in  the  extra-canonical 
gospels  and  acts  current  in  the  first  centuries.  It  was  derived  from  Gnostic 
circles  in  which  the  Mandean  myth  of  Hibil-Ziwa — itself  derived  from  the 
Babylonian  original,  the  Descent  of  Ishtar — was  characteristically  modified. 
While  the  Mandean  hero  delivers  the  imprisoned  spirits  by  breaking  down 
the  gates  of  the  underworld  and  slaying  the  dragon  of  darkness,  the  Gnostic 
Christ-Spirit  effects  this  deliverance  by  imparting  a  secret  knowledge  which 
gives  the  soul  controlling  authority  over  the  Satanic  powers.  (Cp.  Pflei- 
derer's  The  Early  Christian  Conception  of  Christ,  97-106.)  Similar  tales 
of  a  hero's  descent  into  Hades  are  numerous  in  Greek  mythology,  and 
that  they  exerted  an  influence  on  Christian  fancy  appears  from  the  fact 
that  in  the  Catacombs  Christ  is  depicted  as  Orpheus. 


92  Messianism 

When  it  tried  to  picture  what  its  Christ  would  be  and  do 
the  infant  Church  could  not  escape  from  the  messianic 
eschatology  it  had  inherited  from  Judaism.  As  time 
went  on  this  Jewish  influence  grew  ever  more  dominant 
and  it  was  long  before  it  yielded  to  the  influence  of  Hellas. 

The  whole  of  the  later  Jewish  apocalyptic  crossed  silently 
over  to  the  Christians  and  was  held  by  them  in  canonical 
estimation.  Along  with  it  a  mass  of  eschatological  mysteries 
was  conveyed  by  oral  tradition — e.g.  the  legend  of  Anti-Christ 
— so  that  the  farther  we  are  removed  from  Jesus  the  more 
abundant  are  these  Jewish  fancies  among  the  Christians.1 

As  with  the  Christians  of  Jerusalem,  the  Christian  life 
of  the  Apostle  Paul  began  in  the  conviction  that  Jesus 
was  the  Christ,  and  to  spread  abroad  this  conviction  was 
the  missionary  labor  of  the  converted  Pharisee  who  raised 
this  messianic  faith  of  a  despised  people  to  the  height  of  a 
world-religion.  Conceptions  of  the  character  and  office 
of  the  Messiah  he  had  derived  from  Judaic  speculation, 
and  an  inward  revelation  of  that  Messiah  in  the  person 
of  the  crucified  Nazarene  was  the  experience  to  which  his 
conversion  was  solely  due.  From  these  Jewish  ante- 
cedents and  this  personal  experience  it  resulted  that 
eschatological  messianism  was  not  merely  an  appendix 
to  a  theology  otherwise  complete,  but  could  be  nothing 
less  than  the  real  centre  of  the  entire  scheme  of  Pauline 
thought.2  It  is  true  that  Paul  was  led  to  the  view  of  a 
Christian  Messiah  differing  in  certain  aspects  from  the 
Jewish,  but  for  the  Apostle  Jesus  is  always  a  heavenly 
Messiah,  his  earthly  ministry  is  ignored,  and  the  Christian 
life  and  destiny  are  bound  up  with  his  messianic  work. 

There  is  one  book  of  the  New  Testament  which  breathes 
a  purer  air  than  that  of  messianism,  and  translates  its 

1  Wernle,  The  Beginnings  of  Christianity,  ii,  53. 

2  Cp.  Mathews,  op.  cit.,  Pt.  iii,  ch.  ii. 


Messianism  93 

materialized  eschatology  into  terms  of  the  spiritual  life. 
In  the  fourth  gospel,  the  world  is  not  given  over  to  de- 
struction, "for  God  sent  not  His  Son  to  condemn  the  world, 
but  that  the  world  through  him  might  be  saved"  (John 
iii,  17).  There  is  no  looking  forward  to  the  coming  of 
Christ  in  the  clouds  of  heaven  to  judge  the  world,  for  the 
Judge  has  already  come  in  the  person  of  the  Spirit.  The 
judgment  is  no  court  assize,  but  a  silent,  continuous,  self- 
executing  process  of  separation  between  the  children  of 
light  and  of  darkness.  With  this  the  Jewish  doctrine  of 
resurrection  disappears.  Death  is  no  longer  a  weary 
sojourn  in  the  underworld,  but  the  change  of  a  moment, 
and  the  Logos  declares :  "  If  a  man  keep  my  word  he  shall 
never  see  death.  ...  I  am  the  resurrection  and  the  life; 
he  that  believeth  in  me  though  he  die  yet  shall  he  live, 
and  he  that  liveth  and  believeth  in  me  shall  never  die" 
(viii,  51 ;  xi,  25-26).  And  so  "eternal *  regains  its  Gospel 
meaning,  becomes  a  qualitative  term;  eternal  life  is  not 
life  in  a  future  world  but  the  true  life  of  spirit  here  and 
now:  he  that  believeth  hath  eternal  life  (v,  24). x  But 
the  fourth  gospel  is  a  writing  of  the  second  century;  its 
lofty  idealism  was  something  wholly  foreign  to  the  mind 
of  the  first  Christians  and  of  slight  influence  in  later  days. 
The  early  Church  appears  in  history  as  simply  a  messianic 
fraternity  awaiting  their  salvation  from  sin  and  death. 
"The  Christian  churches  were  composed  of  those  who 
sought  'justification'  —  acquittal  at  the  approaching 
messianic  judgment, — by  'faith'  that  is,  by  accepting 

1  It  is  true  there  are  passages  where  the  language  of  messianism  appears 
in  contradiction  with  the  doctrine  of  this  spiritual  gospel:  the  word  the 
unbeliever  will  not  receive  shall  "judge  him  in  the  last  day, "  and  those  the 
Father  hath  given  him  the  Son  will  "raise  up  at  the  last  day."  It  would 
seem  from  these  discordant  utterances  that  the  writer  found  himself  forced 
to  make  some  concession  to  beliefs  too  firmly  fixed  to  be  set  aside,  and 
obliged  to  avoid  a  violent  break  with  the  Jewish  eschatology  integral  with 
the  faith  of  the  Church. 


94  Messianism 

Jesus  as  the  eschatological  Messiah. ' ' x  The  first  Christian 
preaching  was  in  its  main  effect  a  proclamation  of  the 
nearness  of  the  messianic  kingdom  and  the  speedy  coming 
of  the  Christ.  "Christianity  spread  as  the  belief  in  a 
catastrophe  impending  over  the  whole  world  which  the 
Messiah  of  the  Jews  was  to  introduce." 2 

These  messianic  preoccupations  accorded  ill  with  the 
inspirations  of  Jesus;  they  went  far  to  check  and  turn 
aside  the  influence  of  his  Gospel  upon  the  personal  life, 
and  to  kill  out  all  aspiration  to  social  betterment.  The 
ethical  and  social  teachings  of  the  Christian  missionaries 
were  addressed  exclusively  to  the  churches,  religious 
fraternities  separated  from  the  outer  world  and  having  as 
little  as  possible  to  do  with  it.  The  Church  was  the  Ark 
of  salvation  for  the  elect,  withdrawn  from  society  at  large. 
Men  hypnotized  by  their  fixed  gaze  into  the  heavens  had 
no  thought  for  the  conversion  of  the  world,  and  their 
indifference  to  its  interests  was  as  inevitable  as  it  was  all 
but  fatal  to  the  advent  of  the  true  kingdom  of  God 
through  the  gradual  leavening  of  society  by  new  principles 
of  life.  For  the  end  of  all  things  was  at  hand.  The  judg- 
ment loomed  upon  the  living  generation.  Why  plan  for 
posterity  when  there  was  not  to  be  any  posterity,  or  how 
could  they  be  the  salt  of  the  earth  who  were  to  be  saved  as 
brands  from  the  burning  out  of  a  perishing  world  ?  What 
it  must  have  been  to  live  in  daily  expectation  of  the 
messianic  world-catastrophe  when  the  Lord  should 
descend  from  heaven  with  a  shout,  with  the  voice  of  the 
archangel  and  the  trump  of  God,  and  the  dead  in  Christ 
should  rise  and  with  them  the  living  should  be  caught  up 
in  the  clouds  to  meet  the  Lord  in  the  air3;  how  the  pros- 
pect of  this  immediate  future  must  have  dwarfed  the 

1  Mathews,  op.  tit.,  p.  261. 

a  Hausrath,  The  Times  of  the  Apostles,  ii,  201. 

s  I  Thess.,  iv,  16-17. 


Messianism  95 

present  into  insignificance  and  dominated  the  thoughts 
and  feelings  of  every  hour,  is  something  hardly  possible 
for  us  to  conceive.  With  the  lapse  of  time  the  dream 
faded,  the  strain  relaxed.  Yet  the  old  ideas  did  not  lose 
their  power.  The  kingdom  of  God  was  not  thought  of  as 
the  life  of  man  ordered  in  harmony  with  the  Divine;  it 
belonged  to  another  life  in  the  heaven  beyond  the  grave. 
It  was  still  an  evil  world,  to  be  renounced  rather  than 
redeemed;  and  there  remained  that  breach  between  the 
Church  and  the  world  which  contradicts  the  essential 
thought  of  Jesus,  and  has  done  more  than  anything  else 
to  cramp  and  thwart  the  beneficent  action  of  Christianity 
upon  society.  And  throughout  all  modification  by  Greek 
or  Roman  influence,  throughout  all  adaptations  to  the 
changing  conditions  of  its  later  history,  messianism  has 
survived  to  our  own  day  in  the  religion  taught  in  the  name 
of  Jesus,  and  saturates  the  language  of  Christian  faith  and 
worship.  But  if  when  that  religion  was  a  child  it  thought 
as  a  child  and  understood  as  a  child,  it  is  high  time  to  take 
it  out  of  the  swaddling  clothes  of  Jewish  apocalyptic.1 
Out  of  what  blindness  to  the  real  nature  of  Jesus,  out  of 
how  dull  a  misconception  of  him  did  that  idea  take  rise! 
How  much  purer  and  deeper  would  have  been  the  religious 
life  he  brought  into  the  world  if  these  fantastic  doctrines 
of  the  "last  things"  could  have  gone  the  way  of  the 
Levitical  law  in  the  first  Christian  generation ! 

If  the  disciples  had  only  kept  the  injunction  to  tell  no 
man  that  he  was  the  Christ  instead  of  spending  their  lives  in 

I  "Not  an  interpretative  concept  born  of  an  abandoned  cosmology  and  a 
persistently  political  conception  of  God,  but  the  eternal  life  born  of  God 
through  faith  in  Jesus  as  His  revealer — that  is  the  eternal  element  in 
Christianity."     Mathews,  op.  tit.,  321. 

II  It  is  time  that  intelligent  people  throughout  the  Christian  world  learned 
that  the  idea  of  a  Messiah  had  its  origin  only  in  the  fantastic  dream  of  a 
few  irresponsible  fanatics,  that  there  never  could  be  a  corresponding  reality, 
and  consequently  that  Jesus  was  not  a  Messiah."     Lester,  op.  cit.,  41. 


96  Messianism 

reversing  it,  Christendom,  I  am  tempted  to  think,  might  have 
possessed  a  purer  record  of  genuine  revelation  instead  of  a 
mixed  text  of  divine  truth  and  false  apocalyptic.  For  the 
first  deforming  mask,  the  first  robe  of  hopeless  disguise,  under 
which  the  real  personality  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  disappeared 
from  sight  were  placed  upon  him  by  this  very  doctrine  which 
was  not  to  go  forth — that  he  was  the  Messiah.  It  has  spoiled 
the  very  composition  of  the  New  Testament,  and  both  in  its 
letters  and  its  narratives  has  made  the  highest  influence  ever 
shed  upon  humanity  subservient  to  the  proof  of  untenable  posi- 
tions and  the  establishment  of  unreal  relations.  .  .  .  On  this 
small  and  mistaken  base  there  has  been  heaped  up  an  immense 
and  widening  mass  of  Christian  mythology,  from  the  first 
unstable  and  now  at  last  apparently  swerving  to  its  fall. 
And  let  it  fall:  for  it  has  corrupted  the  religion  of  Jesus  into 
an  apocalyptic  fiction;  and  that  so  monstrous  in  its  account 
of  man,  in  its  theory  of  God,  in  its  picture  of  the  universe, 
in  its  distorted  reflections  of  life  and  death,  that  if  the  belief 
in  it  were  as  real  as  the  profession  of  it  is  loud,  society  would 
relapse  into  a  moral  and  intellectual  darkness  it  has  long  left 
and  the  lowest  element  of  modern  civilization  would  be  its 
faith."1 

1  Martineau,  op.  cit.,  329-325. 


Ill 

Paxilinism 

IT  may  be  thought  that  the  last  paragraph  of  the  pre- 
ceding note  is  somewhat  warmly  worded,  I5ut  a  careful 
study  of  the  theology  based  on  messianic  conceptions  will 
show  at  least  how  widely  it  differs  from  the  religion  of 
Jesus,  and  something  of  this  difference  cannot  but  appear 
even  from  the  rapid  glance  at  the  Pauline  " Gospel" 
which  is  taken  in  the  following  pages. 

First,  let  us  turn  to  the  Apostle's  doctrine  of  the  Christ. 
The  Messiah  of  the  first  Christians  was  a  man,  risen 
from  the  dead,  taken  up  into  heaven  and  enthroned  on 
the  right  hand  of  God.  The  Pauline  Messiah  was  a 
heavenly  being  who  had  descended  upon  earth  in  the  form 
of  a  man.  Such  a  modification  of  the  primitive  Chris- 
tology  was  the  easier  for  the  Apostle  since  he  had  no  share 
in  that  wealth  of  warm  personal  memories  which  clung  to 
the  living  Jesus  and  made  it  absurd  to  imagine  that  he 
was  not  a  real  earth-born  man.  Paul  writes  of  his 
Messiah  that  being  originally  in  the  form  of  God,  he  took 
the  form  of  a  slave,  became  in  the  likeness  of  men,  and  was 
found  in  fashion  as  a  man  (Phil,  ii,  6-8).  Elsewhere  we 
read  that  while  the  first  Adam  became  a  living  soul,  the 
last  Adam  became  a  life-giving  spirit;  the  first  man  is  of 
the  earth,  earthy,  the  second  man  is  of  heaven  (I  Cor. 
xv,  45-47).  In  this  latter  passage  Paul  is  adopting  the 
7  97 


98  Paulinism 

theory  of  Philo,  the  Hellenistic  philosopher  of  Alexandria, 
concerning  the  creation  of  man.  As  we  know,  the  first 
two  chapters  of  Genesis  give  us  two  accounts  of  the 
creation,  that  of  the  primitive  Jahvist  in  the  second 
chapter  and  that  of  the  later  Elohist  in  the  first.  Accord- 
ing to  Philo's  interpretation,  however,  we  have  in  regard 
to  man's  creation  not  two  different  versions  of  the  same 
event,  but  the  report  of  two  different  creative  acts.  Gen. 
ii,  7,  "the  man  became  a  living  soul,"  refers  to  the  man 
who  appears  at  the  beginning  of  human  history — the 
first  Adam;  while  Gen.  i,  27,  "God  created  man  in  His 
own  image,"  refers  to  another  man,  one  who  will  appear 
at  the  end  of  history — the  last  Adam.  Paul's  Messiah  is 
this  heavenly  man.  The  phrase  in  Philippians,  "in  the 
form  of  God,"  appears  to  be  simply  an  equivalent  for 
"in  the  image  of  God"  in  Genesis.  It  seems  then  that 
it  is  not  humanity,  but  the  Christ  that  is  created  in  the 
image  of  God.  He  is  man,  ideal  Man,  from  the  first. 
When  it  is  said  of  the  Christ  that  he  was  made  in  the  like- 
ness of  men,  was  found  in  fashion  as  a  man,  it  is  only  the 
earthly  man  of  flesh  and  blood,  man  corporeal  and  cor- 
ruptible, to  whom  these  expressions  apply.  When  Philo 
"Platonises"  the  heavenly  Man  is  represented  as  the  idea, 
the  archetype,  of  Man  that  lies  in  the  creative  Mind 
before  its  realisation;  but  he  has  also  definite  statements 
which  emerge  from  the  realm  of  abstractions  and  show 
that  he  held  to  the  actual  existence  of  a  personal  heavenly 
being,  and  in  this  theory,  it  has  been  maintained,  he  is 
dependent  on  a  current  Hellenistic  myth.  It  is  to  this 
concrete  conception  of  Philo's  and  the  Anthropos-myth 
that  we  must  look  for  one  source  of  the  Pauline  doctrine. 
That  doctrine  drew  upon  other  sources.  It  is  not 
Alexandrine  philosophy  but  Jewish  apocalyptic  that 
suggests  the  identification  of  the  heavenly  Man  with  the 
Messiah.  In  one  of  the  visions  of  "Daniel  the  prophet" 


Paulinism  99 

the  kingdoms  of  the  world  pictured  in  the  form  of  animals 
rise  successively  before  him  until  finally  one  "like  a  son 
of  man"  comes  in  the  clouds  of  heaven  to  whom  is  given 
an  everlasting  dominion  over  the  whole  earth.  Accord- 
ing to  the  interpretation  made  known  to  the  seer,  this 
dominion,  "the  greatness  of  the  Kingdom  under  the  whole 
heaven,"  shall  be  given  to  the  people  of  the  saints  of  the 
Most  High  to  possess  it  forever. '  The  human  figure  of 
the  vision  is  therefore  the  representative  of  Israel,  as  the 
beasts  represent  the  heathen  monarchies.  After  the 
appearance  of  the  Psalter  of  Solomon,  however,  this 
"Son  of  Man"  came  to  be  taken  as  signifying  the  Messiah, 
and  the  Christian  community,  possessed  with  the  faith 
that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah,  applied  to  him  the  prediction 
of  Daniel  and  looked  for  his  coming  in  the  clouds  of  heaven 
to  assume  the  dominion  foretold.  Such  a  being,  strangely 
remote  from  the  Prophet  of  the  Galilean  lake-side,  could 
not  really  be  regarded  as  merely  a  man,  subject  to  the 
common  limitations  of  humanity;  but  this  latent  implica- 
tion of  the  "Son  of  Man  "  belief  apparently  passed  without 
notice  by  the  Christians  until  it  was  brought  plainly  to 
view  by  the  messianic  doctrine  of  St.  Paul.2  That  Paul 
in  the  Philippian  Letter  had  in  mind  the  apocalyptic  Son 
of  Man  seems  not  unlikely.  Weiss  thinks  "it  is  worth 
while  to  ask  whether  the  strangely  chosen  words  of  Phil, 
ii,  7,  'in  the  likeness  of  men,'  'being  found  in  fashion  as  a 
man,'  are  not  an  echo  of  the  curious  words  of  Daniel  vii, 
13,  'like  a  man  it  came.'"3 

Christ  as  the  Heavenly  Man  is  the  dominant  conception 
from  which  the  Apostle's  doctrine  of  salvation  proceeds, 

1  Daniel  vii. 

a  Writing  in  Greek,  Paul  does  not  use  the  Hebrew  locution,  Son  of 
Man,  which  his  readers  would  take  as  expressing  human  descent  and 
origin.  He  calls  Jesus  the  Man,  translating  for  them  the  apocalyptic  title. 

*  Weiss,  Christ:  The  Beginnings  of  Dogma,  79. 


ioo  Paulinism 

but  his  thought  embraces  other  aspects  of  the  being  of 
Christ,  and  taking  them  all  together  we  find  that  the 
Pauline  Christology  contains  in  germ  the  whole  after 
development  of  that  doctrine.  Saul  the  Pharisee  held 
the  belief  of  a  certain  number  of  his  co-religionists  that  the 
Messiah  existed  from  all  eternity  with  God  in  heaven,  and 
when  in  the  vision  of  his  conversion  Jesus  was  identified 
with  this  Messiah,  that  identification  necessarily  carried 
with  it  the  assumption  of  his  pre-existence ;  and  we  find 
his  activity  traced  far  back  in  the  history  of  Israel  in  I  Cor. 
x,  4:  "They  drank  of  a  spiritual  rock  that  followed  them, 
and  the  rock  was  Christ."  This  preterrestrial  existence 
was  derived  from  God,  and  not  merely  by  a  creative  act, 
as  in  the  case  of  Adam.  We  read  in  Rom.  i,  3,  that  it  is 
the  Son  of  God  who  was  born  of  the  seed  of  David  accord- 
ing to  the  flesh.  This  was  a  new  doctrine  to  the  Chris- 
tians, for  the  sonship  Paul  has  in  mind  is  not  to  be 
understood  in  any  general  or  figurative  sense,  but  in  the 
plain  meaning  of  the  term  that  denotes  parentage  from 
God;  it  is  something  unique — Christ  is  the  Only-Begotten 
of  the  Father,  as  it  was  phrased  in  later  times.  The  idea 
that  the  God  of  heaven  might  have  a  son  is  common  to  the 
Babylonian  and  Egyptian  religions,  but  it  never  took  root 
in  Israel ;  it  is  one  utterly  foreign  to  the  religion  of  Jehovah 
in  its  earlier  as  well  as  its  later  day.  It  may  have  spread 
from  a  polytheistic  mythology  over  the  Greek  world,  but 
where,  precisely,  Paul  derived  his  conception  of  the  Son 
of  God  he  gives  no  hint,  nor  does  he  explain  its  exact 
significance.  "We  must  be  content  with  this  result,  that 
the  conception  of  a  Son,  nearer  to  God  than  any  other  being 
and  of  like  nature,  was  given  to  Paul  and  that  he  adopted 
it  without  much  reflection  and  applied  it  to  Jesus."1 
Paul's  transformation  of  the  Christian  Messiah  was 
practically  imposed  upon  the  missionary  to  the  Gentiles. 
1  Weiss,  op.  cit.t  70. 


Paulinism  ibi 

The  messianic  preaching  of  the  Jerusalem  Church  might 
be  effective  with  the  Jews  of  the  Diaspora,  but  for  Greeks 
of  Ephesus  or  Corinth  there  was  need  of  something  more 
congenial  with  their  mental  habit  and  training  than  this 
foreign  outlandish  apocalyptic.1 

Another  phase  of  this  Christology  points  plainly  to  a 
Hellenistic  origin.  In  I  Cor.  viii,  6  we  read:  "To  us 
there  is  one  God,  of  whom  are  all  things  and  we  unto  Him, 
and  one  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  through  whom  ar£  all  things 
and  we  through  him."  This  chapter  deals  with  the 
question  of  idol  meats,  and  the  statement  of  verse  6 
appears  in  the  context  as  a  parenthetical,  almost  a  casual, 
utterance,  and  one  which  will  be  readily  understood  and 
needs  no  explanation.  In  fact  the  prepositions  in  this 
passage — of  whom,  through  whom — are  familiar  terms  of 
the  widely  diffused  popular  philosophy,  as  expounded  by 
Seneca,  Plutarch,  or  Philo,  and  express  relation  to  the 
cause  and  the  instrument  of  the  world's  creation — God 
and  the  Logos.  When  the  Apostle  wrote  that  it  is 
Christ  "through  whom  are  all  things,"  the  Corinthians 
could  only  understand  him  to  assert  that  Christ  had 
taken  the  very  same  place  in  the  Christian  faith 
which  the  Logos  held  in  the  Greek  system.2  That  God 
should  require  an  assistant  in  creation  is  not  to  be  gath- 
ered from  the  accounts  in  Genesis,  nor  does  it  go  well 
with  monotheistic  belief,  but  such  a  notion  would  seem 
quite  acceptable  wherever  the  idea  prevailed  that  it  was 

1  "How  can  we  imagine  that  the  crucified  Messiah  of  the  Jews  could 
have  made  his  triumphal  march  through  the  Greek  and  Roman  world  if  he 
had  not  put  on  in  Paul's  proclamation  of  him  the  luminous  form  of  the 
celestial  Son  of  God  in  which  he  could  be  readily  received  by  the  religious 
and  philosophical  consciousness  of  the  heathen  world?"      Pfleiderer,  The 
Influence  of  the  Apostle  Paul  on  the  Development  of  Christianity,  12. 

2  "As  for  the  name,  Logos,  Paul  does  not  actually  make  use  of  it,  but 
except  for  the  word,  Philo's  speculative  theories  have  now  become  positive 
religion  in  the  school  of  Paul."    Hausrath,  Time  of  the  Apostles,  iii,  103. 


I VI 


102  Paulinism 

the  province  of  intermediary  beings  to  maintain  relations 
between  God  and  the  world. 

Paul's  doctrine  of  the  Holy  Spirit  is  of  all  others  in  his 
theology  perhaps  the  most  obscure,  since  it  belongs  in  the 
region  of  profound  mysticism  and,  besides,  appears 
singularly  vacillating  and  unsettled  in  its  statement. 
While  in  some  passages  he  speaks  of  the  Spirit  as  an 
independent  personality  (I  Cor.  xii,  4-6;  II  Cor.  xiii,  14), 
and  again  of  the  Spirit  of  God  and  the  Spirit  of  Christ  as 
one  and  the  same  (Rom.  viii,  9),  or  of  the  Spirit  as  the 
Spirit  of  the  Son  (Gal.  iv,  6),  in  one  place  at  least  the 
Spirit  is  distinctly  identified  with  Christ:  "Now  the  Lord 
is  the  Spirit"  (II  Cor.  iii,  17).  In  the  former  Letter  it  is 
said  that  "the  last  Adam  became  a  life-giving  spirit" 
(I  Cor.  xv,  45) — with  which  we  may  compare  the  phrase 
of  Rom.  viii,  2:  "the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  in  Christ 
Jesus."  This  is  only  to  represent  Christ  as  a  spiritual 
being;  that  the  Lord  is  the  Spirit  and  not  merely  a  spirit 
would  seem  to  be  announced  as  the  full  truth  of  the  earlier 
assertion.  The  same  teaching  appears  in  the  fourth 
gospel:  "I  will  pray  the  Father  and  He  shall  give  you 
another  Comforter,  the  Spirit  of  truth.  I  will  not  leave 
you  comfortless;  I  will  come  to  you"  (John  xiv,  16-18). 
Christ  the  Spirit  dwells  in  the  individual  soul  (Gal.  ii, 
20;  Rom.  viii,  n;  I  Cor.  iii,  16)  and  the  soul  in  Christ 
(II  Cor.  v,  17).  Or  Christ  is  formed  in  a  man  and  he 
becomes  with  Christ  one  spirit  (Gal.  iv,  19;  I  Cor.  vi,  17). 
And  this  that  is  true  of  each  is  true  of  all  believers.  All 
are  in  Christ,  and  together  they  constitute  his  mystic 
Body;  in  him  they  are  all  one  man  (Gal.  iii,  28).  That 
many  spirits  might  dwell  in  one  person  was  a  common 
belief,  but  it  appears  to  be  a  teaching  original  with  Paul 
that  one  spirit  may  dwell  in  many  persons.  Subjectively, 
the  consciousness,  or  the  feeling,  of  this  indwelling  Spirit 
tends  to  override  or  overcloud  other  important  elements  of 


Paulinism  103 

a  healthy  personal  religion,  but  here  we  have  to  note  the 
objective  effect  of  this  mystical  teaching.  In  this  aspect 
of  the  Pauline  Christology  the  personality  of  Christ  melts 
into  the  general  element  of  the  Spirit  which  fills  all  Chris- 
tians. Christ  the  Spirit  takes  the  place  of  the  Divine 
Energy  which  according  to  the  contemporary  philosophy 
envelops  and  pervades  all  existence,  and  such  ^  concep- 
tion brings  with  it  a  "pantheistic  dissipation"  of  his  actual 
personal  being. 

We  come  finally  to  the  difficult  question  of  the  Incar- 
nation, and  for  Paul's  view  of  it  we  may  turn  again  to  the 
passage  in  Philippians  referred  to  above.  Though  his 
being  was  in  the  form  of  God,  the  Christ  did  not  grasp  at 
equality  with  God — as  the  first  man  had  attempted  when 
the  serpent  held  out  to  him  this  alluring  prize.  More  than 
that,  he  surrendered  the  God-like  form  he  possessed, 
divested  himself  of  his  heavenly  glory,  and  in  contrast 
with  the  divine  lordship  he  might  have  aimed  at,  assumed 
the  form  of  a  slave,  the  likeness  of  men;  and  becoming 
subject  to  death,  died  the  death  of  a  felon.  The  Incarna- 
tion then  was  a  voluntary  renunciation,  a  great  relin- 
quishment:  "Though  he  was  rich,  yet  for  our  sake  he 
became  poor"  (II  Cor.  viii,  9).  The  expression,  "he 
emptied  himself"  (SGCUTOV  e/clvwaev),  is  not  to  be  taken 
literally,  as  if  Christ  had  parted  with  the  essence  of  his 
being ;  it  means  rather  that  he  stripped  himself  of  his  divine 
prerogatives  when  he  put  off  "the  body  of  his  glory"  to 
take  "the  body  of  our  humiliation"  (Phil,  iii,  21). 

The  expression  affirms  quite  generally  that  he  gave  up  a 
valuable  possession  in  that  he  underwent  a  change  of  "form," 
of  the  outward  condition  of  his  existence.  The  inward  nature 
of  Christ  remained  unaltered  in  the  process;  as  man  with  a 
body  of  flesh  he  still  remained  the  same  person,  the  heavenly 
Man  in  earthly  garb.1 

1  Weiss,  op.  ciL,  100. 


104  Paulinism 

So  then  Christ  incarnate  has  a  twofold  being,  or  in  him 
two  beings  of  different  order  are  united :  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
born  of  a  woman,  subject  to  the  Law,  of  the  seed  of  David 
— begotten,  that  is,  by  one  of  the  house  of  David — to  all 
appearance  a  man  like  any  other  man;  yet  at  the  same 
time  the  Man  from  heaven,  a  spiritual  being  existent 
before  the  creation  and  himself  taking  active  part  in  that 
work.  It  was  a  necessity  to  the  Pauline  theology  that 
the  Christ  should  die,  and  to  that  end  he  had  to  appear 
on  earth  in  the  flesh.  "Had  Paul  remained  a  Jew," 
remarked  Weiss,  "he  would  not  have  needed  the  idea  of 
incarnation";  there  would  have  been  no  reason  why  his 
heavenly  Messiah  should  enter  into  this  strange  union 
with  an  earthly  man.  The  nature  of  this  union,  how  it  is 
to  be  conceived,  is  a  problem  that  bristles  with  trouble 
for  the  Apostle.  It  is  his  fixed  preconception  that  the 
"flesh"  is  inherently  sinful;  the  body  of  flesh  is  a  body  of 
sin  (Rom.  vi,  6).  If  then  a  divine  spirit  becomes  in- 
carnate, how  can  he  escape  subjection  to  "the  law  of  sin"  ? 
When  we  read  that  Christ  "died  unto  sin"  (Rom.  vi,  10) 
is  it  not  a  necessary  implication  that  in  his  earthly  life  he 
was,  however  free  from  actual  transgression,  capable  of 
sinning?  When  Paul  writes :  "God  sending  His  own  Son 
in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh  condemned  sin  in  the  flesh" 
(Rom.  viii,  3),  if  that  means  that  sin  was  put  to  death  in 
the  crucifixion  of  the  Christ,  does  it  not  inevitably  follow 
that  sin  must  have  reigned  in  the  mortal  body  of  the  Christ  ? 
If  he  by  his  death  delivered  mankind  from  the  power  of 
sin,  must  he  not  have  been  actually  a  man,  sharing  with 
other  men  the  proclivity  to  sin?  These  questions  seem 
to  demand  an  affirmative  answer,  but  on  the  other  hand 
to  the  Apostle's  mind  nothing  is  more  unquestionable 
than  the  absolute  sinlessness  of  the  Divine  Man  from 
heaven,  his  incapability  of  sin  in  every  form  of  his  exist- 
ence. Hence  arises  a  contradiction  which  resists  all 


Paulinism  105 

attempts  to  resolve  it.  It  is  plain  that  an  organic  union 
between  a  divine  being  and  human  nature  as  Paul  con- 
ceives it  remains  an  impossibility.  The  Apostle  betrays 
a  sense  of  the  impasse  he  has  reached  by  what  seems  a  half 
conscious  endeavor  to  evade  it.  In  the  passage  of  Romans 
last  cited  we  read  that  God  sent  His  Son  "in  the  likeness 
of  the  flesh  of  sin. "  That  the  Son  is  sent  in  the  flesh  of  sin 
is  what  the  argument  in  this  place  really  requires,  but 
Paul  shrinks  from  so  extreme  a  statement,  and  in  modifica- 
tion of  it  the  term  "likeness"  is  as  it  were  slipped  in. 
This  means,  if  it  means  anything,  that  the  body  of  Christ 
was  similar  to  that  of  sinful  flesh,  but  not  the  same.  Or, 
if  we  take  another  meaning  of  o^ofw^a,  it  means  that  in 
"appearance  "  Christ  was  physically  a  man  like  other  men ; 
and  it  is  implied  that  this  was  only  in  appearance,  that  the 
garment  of  flesh  he  assumed  was  something  wholly  exter- 
nal to  him.  This  is  the  doctrine  we  met  with  at  the  outset 
in  Phil,  ii:  "made  in  the  likeness  of  men  and  found  in 
fashion  as  a  man."  That  is,  he  looked  like  a  man  and 
behaved  like  a  man,  but — all  this  was  mere  outward 
appearance.  "The  opposition  is  between  what  he  is  in 
himself  and  what  he  appeared  in  the  eyes  of  men ' '  (Light- 
foot).  So  then  the  human  nature  of  the  Christ,  far  from 
being  his  own  nature,  is  in  effect  the  disguise  of  a  mas- 
querade, and  the  way  is  open  to  the  approach  of  Docetism 
and  its  phantom  Christ.  Paul  would  have  protested 
against  such  an  inference  from  his  doctrine,  but  it  must 
be  admitted  that  it  is  not  illogical.  The  manhood  he 
attributes  to  the  Christ  is  not  only  something  external  and 
inessential  to  him,  it  is  merely  a  matter  of  physique.  It  is 
of  course  the  possession  of  thought,  feeling,  will  in  a  way 
peculiar  to  oneself  that  constitutes  a  definite  human 
individuality,  and  so  human  individuality  is  just  what  is 
lacking  to  the  divine  being  Paul  calls  a  man,  to  the  Jesus 
that  he  makes  one  with  Christ. 


io6  Paulinism 

If  with  the  primitive  community  Paul  could  have  regarded 
Jesus  simply  as  a  prophetically  inspired  man,  who  after  death 
was  exalted  to  God,  no  difficulty  would  have  arisen.  But  his 
problem  was  to  unite  the  conception  of  the  heavenly  Christ 
with  the  tradition  of  the  crucified  Jesus,  and  this  was  possible 
only  at  the  expense  either  of  the  human  or  the  divine  (he 
wants  to  keep  both  unimpaired),  or  at  the  expense  of  the  or- 
ganic unity  of  the  personality.  The  result  was  a  hybrid 
form  which  already  contained  the  foundations  and  anticipa- 
tions of  all  possible  heresies  and  almost  all  the  Christological 
problems  of  the  future.1 

To  this  we  may  add  the  pronouncement  of  Meyer. 

What  we  find  in  St.  Paul  is  really  a  Gnostic  system,  as 
much  a  creation  of  thought  and  imagination  as  the  creations 
of  Valentinus  and  Basilides  in  the  sphere  of  heretical  Gnosis, 
or  of  Origen  in  the  Church.  .  .  .  Paul  shares  in  the  question- 
able characteristics  of  all  Gnosticism ;  in  that  predominance  of 
the  fantastic,  that  speculation  which  is  the  slave  of  feeling 
and  fancy;  that  tendency  to  loose  generalising;  that  inter- 
weaving of  absolutely  incongruous  elements;  that  absorbing 
interest  in  cabalistic  theory  and  in  myth  instead  of  in  historical 
fact.  In  spite  of  his  alien  garment  of  earth  the  Heavenly 
Christ  remains  a  genuinely  Gnostic  creation.2 

While  the  Christology  of  Paul  has  vital  importance  for 
us  in  view  of  its  later  development,  his  Soteriology  is  the 
constituent  of  what  may  loosely  be  called  his  system  that 
chiefly  claims  attention.  It  is  a  doctrine  difficult  to  deal 
with  because  the  conceptions  that  underlie  it  and  the 
principles  it  assumes  are  archaic,  bizarre,  foreign  to  our 
modes  of  thinking,  and  because  the  expression  of  them  is 
fragmentary,  incoherent,  often  inconsistent  and  some- 
times contradictory.3  Briefly,  in  its  main  outlines,  it 

1  Weiss,  op.  tit.,  115.  2  Meyer,  Jesus  or  Paul?  23. 

3  "The  thought  wavers  and  alters  from  one  letter  to  another,  even 
from  chapter  to  chapter,  without  the  slightest  regard  for  consistency. 


Paulinism  107 

comes  to  this :  Christ  came  from  heaven  for  the  salvation 
of  men,  and  what  men  needed  to  be  saved  from  was  the 
misery  of  their  whole  condition  in  this  world,  dominated 
as  it  is  by  the  evil  powers,  Flesh,  Sin,  Law,  and  Death. 
These  powers  loom  up  before  the  Apostle's  mental  eye 
vast  and  vague,  like  objects  seen  through  fog,  and  bale- 
fully  active.  It  is  owing  perhaps  to  the  native  incapacity 
of  the  Semitic  mind  for  abstract  thinking  that  each  of 
them,  conceived  as  a  power  of  universal  sovereignty  in  the 
life  of  the  race,  wears  the  appearance  of  a  kind  of  mythologi- 
cal monster  and  is  spoken  of  quite  as  if  it  were  a  personal 
agent.  Or  we  might  say  that  Paul  holds  to  the  "reality  of 
general  ideas,"  anticipating  the  theory  long  dominant 
among  the  medieval  Scholastics. 

To  him  "the  flesh"  in  general  is  not  an  abstraction  but  a 
reality,  a  great  powerful  existence  in  life,  in  which  as  members 
all  individual  men  by  reason  of  their  corporeality  have  part. 
And  in  the  same  way  sin  is  a  great,  universal,  uniting  power 
which  rules  in  the  whole  organism  of  corporeality.1 

The  "flesh  of  sin, "  the  "body  of  death"  are  not  rhetorical 
expressions;  they  are  misunderstood  if  not  taken  literally. 
Sin  has  its  seat  in  the  flesh  and  clings  to  it  indissolubly ; 
and  since  every  man  is  "in  the  flesh, "  he  is,  in  virtue  of  his 
mere  bodily  existence,  of  necessity  subject  to  sin. 2 

His  points  of  view  and  leading  premises  change  and  traverse  each  other 
without  his  perceiving  it.  Tortured  attempts  to  reconcile  his  opposing 
statements  are  futile,  nor  is  it  safe  to  say  that  Paul  could  not  have  meant 
a  thing  because  it  leads  to  impossible  consequences;  the  consequences  may 
be  impossible,  but  Paul  did  not  heed  them."  Wrede,  Paul,  77. 

1  Weiss,  op.  cit.,  105. 

3  "With  the  usual  personifying  tendency  of  antiquity  Paul  makes  the 
sinful  principle  an  independent  entity,  an  active  subject  to  which  all 
manner  of  predicates  can  be  attached.  ...  He  really  saw  in  sin  a  demonic 
spiritual  being  which  takes  possession  of  men,  sets  up  its  throne  in  the 
material  flesh  of  their  body,  excites  the  passions,  enslaves  the  will,  and 


io8  Paulinism 

The  Law  comes  in  to  make  matters  worse.  It  brings 
the  knowledge  of  sin,  incites  to  sin,  turns  sin  into  guilt,  and 
so  works  death  to  the  man — for  death,  extinction,  is  the 
inevitable  consequence  of  sin  (Rom.  vii,  7—13).  Death  is 
ranked  among  the  evil  spirits  whom  Christ  is  to  overcome, 
and  this  "last  enemy"  to  be  destroyed  is  spoken  of  as  if  it 
were  an  individual  being;  it  is  a  representation  that  re- 
minds one  of  St.  George  and  the  Dragon.  These  evil 
spirits — angels,  principalities,  and  powers — are  the  "rulers 
of  this  world/'  It  seems  that  God  has  retired  in  favor  of 
His  hostile  rivals  and  left  mankind  helpless  under  their 
tyranny,  which  is  allied  with  that  of  sin  and  the  others. x 

From  this  desperate  plight  of  the  human  condition  men 
are  rescued  by  the  death  and  resurrection  of  Christ.  The 
heavenly  Man  assumes  the  garb  of  sinful  flesh,  becomes 
subject  to  the  Law  and  its  curse  (Gal.  iii,  10-13),  and  falls 
under  the  sway  of  the  demonic  powers  who  finally  crucify 
him  (I  Cor.  ii,  6-8). 2  Christ  must  die  because  he  is  a 
man,  because  he  has  taken  upon  himself  the  sinful  human 
nature  which  is  doomed  to  death.  With  this  the  triumph 
of  the  demons  seems  assured,  but  at  the  last  moment  the 
Crucified  snatches  victory  from  defeat.  Through  death  he 
passes  out  of  the  hands  of  the  maligna'nt  powers.  Dis- 

delivers  body  and  soul  over  to  death."  Pfleiderer,  Primitive  Christianity, 
i,  277-278. 

xThe  universe  in  which  Paul  lives,  from  the  demonic  powers  which 
rule  it  to  the  flesh  in  which  he  imprisoned,  is  absolutely  alien  from  God; 
it  is  a  great  Charnel-house  wherein  Death  reigns  as  King,  where  God 
Himself  cannot  and  indeed  will  not  give  any  help;  where  all  morality  is 
sin,  all  religion  is  idolatry,  all  growth  is  corruption.  Of  a  Hell  Paul  says 
nothing;  this  world  is  Hell  enough  for  him."  Meyer,  Jesus  or  Paul,  22. 

3  This  passage  does  not  refer  to  Pilate  or  the  High  Priest.  Wrede's 
comment  is  that  "Paul  means  the  demons  have  fallen  into  their  own 
pit.  They  thought  to  destroy  Christ  by  the  crucifixion.  They  would 
not  have  crucified  him  had  they  known  the  wisdom  of  God,  had  they 
suspected  that  the  Cross  of  Christ  would  bring  salvation  to  the  world  and 
make  an  end  of  them."  Wrede,  Paul,  98,  note  4. 


Paulinism  109 

carding  the  robe  of  flesh,  he  is  freed  from  all  thajt  belongs 
to  Sin,  Law,  and  Death.  He  died  to  sin  once  for  all, 
and  death  no  longer  has  dominion  over  him.  Risen 
from  the  dead,  he  enters,  or  re-enters,  into  the  divine 
life  which  is  above  the  reach  of  attack  by  the  rulers  of 
"this  world."1 

Now  if  we  ask,  what  has  this  exceptional  experience 
of  one  individual  to  do  with  the  salvation  of  mankind,  the 
answer  is  that  this  individual  is  the  representative  of  the 
human  race,  and  his  death  and  resurrection — the  two 
always  taken  together  in  one — are  vicarious:  "One  died 
for  all,  therefore  all  died."  The  flesh  of  sin  was  con- 
demned to  death  on  the  Cross,  and  by  the  death  of  Christ, 
substitutionary  for  the  death  of  all,  men  are  delivered 
from  the  power  of  sin,  redeemed  from  the  curse  of  the  law, 
and  in  his  resurrection  risen  to  the  immortal  life.  It  is 
true  that  believers  are  still  in  the  world,  still  in  the  flesh, 
still  subject  to  Satan,  god  of  this  world,  and  the  powers 
from  whom,  it  is  declared,  Christ  has  freed  them.  To  Paul, 
however,  this  is  only  a  seeming  contradiction,  and  he  does 
not  hesitate  to  say  that  Christians  are  dead  to  sin,  and, 

1 "  The  thought  that  a  divine  being  forsakes  heaven,  veils  himself  in 
humanity  and  then  dies  in  order  to  ascend  again  into  heaven  is  in  its  essence 
a  mythological  conception."  Wrede,  Paul,  179. 

For  the  Greeks  the  Pauline  Christology  embodied  the  truth  of  all  those 
familiar  tales  of  the  sons  of  the  gods  who  descended  from  heaven  as  cham- 
pions of  deliverance,  and  it  was  as  a  form  of  this  myth  that  they  accepted 
it.  In  Syria  and  Cilicia,  where  Paul  worked  for  fourteen  years,  such 
notions  or  fancies  were  especially  prevalent,  and  the  preaching  of  the 
Resurrection  would  meet  with  the  readier  hearing  since  Adonis  and  other 
vegetation  gods  died  yearly  and  after  three  days  returned  to  life  in  the 
upper  world.  In  Paul's  messianic  doctrine  "we  hear  again  that  primeval 
strain  wherein  mankind  through  the  ages  sings  of  the  Divine  Hero  who 
descends  to  earth  and  into  the  depths  of  the  underworld,  thence  returning 
victorious  to  the  throne  of  God,  there  to  take  up  his  power  and  dominion. 
We  hear  it  now  in  its  Christian  form,  in  the  characteristic  transformation 
it  has  undergone  in  a  Jewish  soul,  and  enforced  by  the  exegesis  and  dialectic 
of  the  Rabbins."  Meyer,  op.  tit.,  39. 


no  Paulinism 

therefore,  should  not  let  sin  reign  in  their  mortal  body 
(Rom.   vii,    11—12).      For   this   doctrine   of   redemption 
anticipates  the  future.     Christ  has  already  died  and  risen, 
and  so  in  a  sense  the  death  and  resurrection  of  all  men  are 
accomplished  facts,    only   they   are   not  yet   outwardly 
realised.     Hence  the  attitude  of  Christian-  life  is  one  of 
suspense,  of  looking  forward  to  the  salvation  which  follows 
upon  actual  death.     Such  an  attitude,  we  must  remember, 
is  not  unreasonable  on  the  part  of  one  who  believed  that 
the  coming  of  Christ  and  the  end  of  the  world  were  very 
near  at  hand.     Nor  is  the  Christian  left  wholly  to  himself 
in  the  present  life.     He  is  visited  by  a  divine  helper,  and 
the  earnest  of  salvation  is  given  him  in  the  indwelling  of 
the  Spirit.     This  is  not  to  be  interpreted  in  the  modern 
sense  as  a  penetration  of  the  personality  in  which  it 
becomes  one  with  the  divine;  in  Paul's  conception  the 
Spirit  remains  always  supernaturally  external,  a  power 
foreign  to  the  personal  soul,  whose  working  leaves  no  room 
for  man's  free  agency.     The  Christian's  virtues  are  not  his 
own;  they  are  " fruits  of  the  Spirit."     So  too  salvation  is 
not   something   personal,    a   spiritual   attainment;   it   is 
something  objective,  a  change  in  the  conditions  of  exist- 
ence.   For  sin  is  not  a  matter  of  the  individual  will,  but 
of  human  nature,  and  so  it  is  not  moral  betterment  but  a 
change  of  human  nature  that  results  from  the  redemptive 
death  of  Christ.     Since  the  Reformation  religion  has  been 
mainly  concerned  with  the  personal  soul,  and  its  deepest 
problems  are  psychological.     In  Paul's  theological  con- 
a  unction  he  is  not  thinking  of  the  individual  at  all,  but 
always  of  humanity  as  a  whole.     Death  with  Christ  is  not 
a  personal  experience,  except  as  being  a  general  fact,  it  is 
the  condition  of  all  believers.    The  doctrine  of  salvation 
is  a  recital  of  a  dramatic  series  of  events,  and  all  is  cast  in 
the  mold  of  a  time  element  and  viewed  as  past,  present,  and 
future.     Flesh  and  spirit,  sin  and  righteousness  are  marks 


Paulinism  in 

of  different  periods,  and  Christ  stands  at  the  turning  point 
of  the  old  age  to  the  new. 

A  main  foundation  of  this  Pauline  doctrine  is  the  Neo- 
Platonic  Dualism  which  for  generations  had  dominated 
Hellenistic  thought,  itself  an  echo  of  that  Dualism  of  the 
far  East  which  in  after  times  was  to  affect  more  directly 
the  mind  of  the  Christian  Church.  Above  is  the  heavenly 
world,  the  eternal  source  of  life,  the  home  of  the  ideal 
types  of  all  being ;  below  is  the  material  world  which  only 
exists  in  that  the  shadows  of  the  ideas  lend  it  form  and 
life.  This  material  world  is  in  its  nature  contrary  to  the 
spiritual;  it  is  finite,  or  ''corruptible,"  and  as  material, 
unclean  and  evil.  To  this  impure  world  of  sense  human 
nature  belongs  and  is  subject  to  the  laws  of  its  existence. 
It  appears  further  that  the  Apostle's  anthropology  is 
simply  a  Christian  modification  of  the  popular  Animism 
inherited  from  primitive  times.  The  soul  is  not  organi- 
cally united  with  the  body,  but  merely  contained  in  it,  so 
that  it  can  pass  out  on  occasion  and  have  experiences  by 
itself  alone,  as  Paul  thinks  may  have  occurred  in  his  own 
case  (II  Cor.  xii,  2);  and  so  also  other  spiritual  beings 
can  for  a  time,  or  permanently,  enter  and  dwell  within 
the  body  of  a  man.  Thus  with  the  "outer  man"  in 
bondage  to  Sin  and  the  "inner  man"  possessed  by  a  divine 
Spirit,  no  place  is  left  for  human  freedom  or  personality. 
It  is  a  supernaturalism  that  obliterates  the  ethical  con- 
sciousness, and  leaves  man  to  experience  passively  the 
action  of  the  different  spiritual  beings — personifications 
of  his  own  motives  and  impulses  placed  outside  himself. 
In  Gal.  v,  17,  we  see  man  striven  for  by  hostile  powers,  so 
that  he  never  does  his  own  will  but  always  that  to  which 
he  is  driven  by  one  or  the  other. 

Such  then  is  the  general  view  of  Redemption  as  affected, 
we  may  say,  by  the  Incarnation,  by  the  Son  of  God 
taking  upon  himself  the  human  condition  and  as  man 


ii2  Paulinism 

dying  and  rising  from  the  dead.  It  may  be  summed  up  in 
Wrede's  words:  "Christ  becomes  what  we  are  that  we 
through  his  death  may  become  what  he  is."  In  this 
doctrine  the  Apostle's  originality  declares  itself.  The 
stumbling-block  to  Saul  the  Pharisee  he  makes  the  corner- 
stone of  his  Christian  theology.  The  Christians  felt 
themselves  put  on  the  defensive  in  their  preaching  of  a 
crucified  Messiah.  That  scandal  in  Jewish  eyes  they 
endeavored  to  minimise,  and  to  explain  and  justify  from 
prophetic  Scripture.  To  their  faith  Jesus  risen  from  the 
dead  and  exalted  to  glory  was  in  spite  of  his  death  on  the 
Cross  the  Messiah  of  Israel;  in  the  teaching  of  Paul  it  is 
by  virtue  of  that  death  that  he  becomes  the  Saviour  of  the 
world. 

Another  aspect  of  the  death  of  Christ,  one  that  holds 
special  prominence  in  the  Apostle's  "Word  of  the  Cross," 
is  the  sacrificial;  for  Christ's  death  brings  remission  for  the 
sins  of  men  as  well  as  extinction  of  the  primordial  power  of 
Sin.  Propitiatory  sacrifice  to  appease  an  offended  god, 
or  to  clear  those  guilty  of  the  offence  by  the  death  of  a 
victim  offered  in  their  stead,  is  a  practice  that  appears  to 
be  common  to  all  early  religions  at  a  certain  stage  of 
development.  It  is  held  that  death  is  the  penalty  for  an 
act  which  the  cultus  makes  a  crime,  but  it  is  believed  that 
the  god  will  accept  the  life  of  an  animal  in  place  of  that 
forfeited  by  the  criminal.1  This  idea  was  firmly  fixed 
in  the  mind  of  Israel,  and  not  to  be  dislodged  by  the 
protest  of  the  prophets  that  the  only  way  to  reconciliation 
with  Jehovah  lay  in  repentance  and  reformation.  In  the 
later  days  of  the  Exile  the  ideas  of  expiation  and  substitu- 
tion, embodied  in  the  ritual  of  sacrifice,  found  fuller 
expression.  It  was  the  accepted  belief  that  all  suffering 
was  a  punishment  for  sin,  and  now  the  belief  arose  that  a 

1  For  the  ritual  of  sin-transference  in  early  times  see  Farnell,  The  Evolu- 
tion of  Religion,  116-120. 


Paulinism  113 

man's  suffering  might  atone  for  his  sin,  that  after  an 
adequate  amount  of  suffering  his  sin  would  be  done  away 
and  he  be  restored  to  favor.  Such  was  the  comforting 
message  of  the  "second  Isaiah"  to  his  people.  Further- 
more, according  to  the  primitive  principle  of  the  solidarity 
of  the  clan,  which  bound  all  its  members  into  a  unit  of 
moral  responsibility  and  made  all  sharers  in  the  guilt  of 
each,  the  suffering  was  not  necessarily  to  be  borne  by  the 
offender,  but  the  sin  of  the  father  might  be  visited  on  the 
children,  or  the  nation  suffer  for  the  faults  of  the  rulers. 
This  notion  of  vicarious  punishment  was  repudiated  by 
Ezekiel  who  insisted  on  the  sole  accountability  of  the 
individual  sinner,  but  this  common-sense  doctrine  made 
little  impression  on  minds  possessed  by  the  traditional 
views.  At  the  same  time  the  idea  was  growing  among  the 
exiles  that  there  might  be  such  a  thing  as  unmerited 
suffering.  This  is  the  unsolved  problem  of  the  Book  of 
Job.  That  such  suffering  is  vicarious  is  the  solution 
offered  in  the  Songs  of  the  Servant  of  Jehovah.  Upon 
the  pious  faithful  kernel  of  the  nation  was  laid  the  ini- 
quity of  all,  in  order  that  its  suffering  should  purge  away 
their  guilt  and  all  should  come  to  share  the  blessing  due 
to  its  righteousness. 

Such  are  the  general  notions  underlying  Paul's  theory 
of  the  Atonement,  which  comes  in  brief  to  this :  All  man- 
kind is  guilty  of  the  sin  of  Adam  and  lies  under  the  wrath 
of  God,  doomed  to  destruction;  but  the  Messiah,  a  second 
Adam,  offers  himself  for  a  sacrifice  in  the  stead  of  mankind, 
and  his  death  is  accepted  as  an  equivalent  satisfaction  of 
divine  justice.  This  is  thoroughly  accordant  with  Judaic 
principles.  The  legal  status  of  man  is  maintained  and  the 
axiom,  "without  shedding  of  blood  is  no  remission."  The 
Law  is  inexorable  in  its  demand  for  the  penalty  of  sin. 
It  is  a  power  which  even  God  cannot  disregard  and  He  is 
unable  to  arrest  its  fatal  course.  Man  cannot  be  saved 


1 14  Paulinism 

from  perishing  unless  an  innocent  being  shall  intervene 
to  make  atonement  by  taking  the  penalty  upon  himself. 
Paul  inherits  this  doctrine  from  the  teachers  of  his  people, 
themselves  inheritors  of  primitive  thought.  Everything 
in  Paulinism  has  its  root  in  the  sacrificial  death  of  Christ, 
as  everything  in  the  Gospel  grows  out  of  the  fatherhood  of 
God,  or  the  organic  union  of  divine  and  human  nature. z 
"We  have,  therefore,  in  Paul's  theology  not  an  expansion 
of  Jesus'  thought,  but  an  immanent  development  of  the 
Jewish  consciousness  called  into  being  by  the  new  fact 
of  the  crucified  Messiah."2  Paul,  a  disciple  of  the 
Pharisees,  makes  their  legal  religion  the  starting-point  of 
his  theory  of  redemption.  He  does  not  question  the 
Pharisaic  postulates  and  premises,  but  simply  applies 
them  to  the  case  of  the  death  of  Jesus. 3 

Since  the  purpose  of  Christ's  mission  to  earth  is  to  be 
found  in  his  death,  necessarily  the  earthly  life  of  Jesus— 
his  personal  acquaintance  with  whom  was  limited  to  the 

1  "The  idea  of  atonement  is  the  true  starting-point  of  Pauline  Theology. 
There  can  be  no  question  that  belief  in  the  atonement  was  the  genetic 
prius  of  belief  in  the  incarnation  and  the  divinity  of  Christ;  these  doctrines 
are  inevitable  inferences  from  that  of  atonement."  Mackintosh,  The 
Natural  History  of  the  Christian  Religion,  397. 

3  Hausrath,  The  Time  of  the  Apostles,  iii,  78. 

3  "Ever  since  Paul  the  ruling  idea  of  Christianity  has  been  that  of  the 
redemption  of  man,  guilty  of  a  prehistoric  fault,  by  the  voluntary  sacrifice 
of  a  Superman.  This  doctrine  is  founded  upon  that  of  expiation — a  guilty 
person  must  suffer  to  atone  for  his  fault — and  that  of  the  substitution  of 
victims — the  efficacious  suffering  of  an  innocent  person  for  a  guilty  one. 
Both  are  at  once  pagan  and  Jewish  ideas;  they  belong  to  the  fundamental 
errors  of  humanity.  Yet  Plato  knew  that  the  punishment  inflicted  on  a 
guilty  person  should  not  be  a  vengeance,  but  a  deterrent  and  its  end  the 
protection  of  society;  and  about  the  same  time  Athenian  law  laid  down  the 
principle  that  punishment  should  be  as  personal  as  the  fault.  Thus  St. 
Paul  founded  Christian  theology  on  two  archaic  ideas  which  had  already 
been  condemned  by  enlightened  Athenians  of  the  fourth  century  before 
our  era,  ideas  which  no  one  would  dream  of  upholding  in  these  days,  though 
the  structure  built  upon  them  still  subsists."  Reinach,  Orpheus:  A 
General  History  of  Religions^  237. 


Paulinism  115 

vision  on  the  road  to  Damascus — was  to  Christ's  Apostle  a 
matter  of  entire  indifference.  He  never  appeals  to  utter- 
ances of  the  Master  in  support  of  teachings  of  his  own,  and 
to  anything  learned  from  Peter  during  his  fourteen  days 
stay  at  Jerusalem  he  never  once  alludes.  "If  in  the  face 
of  probability  we  assume  that  he  had  at  an  early  date 
heard  much  about  Jesus,  it  only  becomes  the  more  as- 
tonishing that  this  possessed  no  significance  for  his  mind." z 
For  any  dependence  upon  the  primitive  Apostles  he 
expressly  denies.  He  insists  that  his  gospel  was  not 
"received  from  man";  it  was  not  based  upon  knowledge 
of  the  words  and  deeds  of  Jesus,  but  upon  his  inward 
vision  of  the  heavenly  Christ.  He  did  not  care  to  "confer 
with  flesh  and  blood"  after  his  conversion,  since  to  know 
Christ  after  the  flesh  was  not  to  know  him  at  all.2  For 
the  terrestrial  Jesus  was  but  the  appearance  of  the  celestial, 
archetypal  Man  working  in  the  new  creation  of  humanity. 
He  was  sent  into  the  world  not  to  witness  to  the  Father's 
love  and  the  potential  divinity  of  man,  but  to  earn  the 
repeal  of  the  death  sentence  upon  mankind.  He  did  not 
come  to  live,  but  simply  to  die.  In  this  doctrine  of  a 
crucified  and  risen  Superman 

the  biography  of  Jesus,  the  traits  of  his  mind,  the  story  of 
his  ministry,  play  no  part  at  all:  it  is  from  heaven,  after  he 

1  Wrede,  Paul,  148.  Some  recent  writers  have  endeavored  to  make  out 
that  Paul  was  quite  fully  informed  concerning  the  life  and  teaching  of 
Jesus,  and  to  a  great  extent  even  before  his  conversion.  This  arduous  effort 
merits  a  greater  success  than  it  seems  to  have  attained,  but  after  all  the 
point  is  not  of  first  importance.  The  important  point  is  that  "the  char- 
acter of  Jesus  and  of  his  life  and  work  did  not  determine  the  nature  of 
Paul's  theology.  This  fact  remains  indisputable,  however  much  Paul  may 
have  known  of  Jesus,  whatever  he  may  have  heard  of  him  by  chance 
in  the  course  of  his  missionary  work,  and  though  moved  by  such  accounts 
more  deeply  than  we  know."  Wrede,  Paul,  166. 

3  "  The  fact  that  St.  Paul  had  never  seen  or  heard  the  Lord  when  he  was 
on  earth,  and  that  in  his  zeal  for  his  own  independence  he  had  held  aloof 


n6  Paulinism 

has  done  with  the  hills  of  Galilee  and  the  courts  of  the  Temple, 
that  he  begins  with  his  last  Apostle ;  and  it  is  in  heaven  alone 
that  that  Apostle  knows  anything  of  him. — in  his  glorified 
state  and  immortal  function,  and  not  in  the  simple  humanity 
and  prefatory  affections  of  his  career  below.  The  Pauline 
Gospel  opens  where  the  others  cease.1 

Jesus  so  lived  the  truth  he  taught  that  from  the  first 
a  narrative  of  his  life  was  called  a  gospel,  but  the  per- 
sonality of  the  Man  of  Nazareth  disappears  from  a 
"gospel"  which  shows  no  trace  of  contact  with  the 
primitive  tradition.  The  Apostle's  doctrine  has  its 
source,  he  tells  us,  in  a  personal  revelation  and  the  in- 
spiration of  the  Spirit;  that  is,  in  his  own  thoughts,  ideas, 
and  intuitions.  What  St.  Paul  calls  "my  gospel"  is 
indeed  his  own — the  outcome  of  the  workings  of  an 
individual  mind,  and  its  idiosyncratic  intellectualism 
weakened  it  for  practical  effectiveness. 

Without  that  Gospel  which  existing  side  by  side  with 
Paul's  perpetuated  the  marvellous  sayings  of  the  actual  Jesus 
and  immortalised  his  form  in  its  human  greatness  and  in  its 
oneness  with  God,  his  preaching  of  the  Cross  of  the  God-sent 
Christ  who  destroyed  the  flesh  and  inaugurated  the  kingdom  of 
the  Spirit  would  have  been  a  doctrine  for  thinkers,  a  structure 
of  ideas.2 


from  those  who  had  known  Jesus,  was  in  every  sort  of  way  fatal  for  the 
Apostle."  Meyer,  Jesus  or  Paul?  90. 

1  Martineau,  Seat  of  Authority  in  Religion,  330.  "The  price  which  had 
to  be  paid  (for  Paul's  services  to  Christianity)  was  the  envelopment  of  the 
historical  person,  Jesus,  in  the  mythical  form  of  this  super- temporal  Christ- 
Spirit  descended  from  heaven."  Pfleiderer,  Christian  Origins,  213. 

2 Weizsacker,  The  Apostolic  Age,  i,  173.  "Throughout  the  whole 
history  of  the  Church  the  imitation  of  Jesus  and  the  contemplation  of  the 
whole  personality  of  that  sincere  and  loving  human  soul  has  represented^ 
distinct  stream,  a  distinct  form  of  Christianity  of  peculiar  simplicity  and 
force  which  holds  the  balance  against  the  Pauline  form."  Meyer,  Jesus 
or  Paul?  126. 


Paulinism  117 

We  find  a  logical  ground  for  this  ignoring  of  the  life 
of  Jesus  in  what  we  may  call  the  Apostle's  philosophy  of 
history  which  divides  the  life  of  humanity  into  two  great 
periods,  one  of  the  flesh  and  sin  and  death  which  covers 
all  time  since  Adam,  the  other  of  the  Spirit,  righteousness 
and  life  which  opens  with  the  resurrection  of  the  Christ. 
The  life  of  Jesus — who  was  born  of  a  woman,  of  the 
seed  of  David,  under  the  Law,  sent  in  the  likeness  of 
sinful  flesh — belongs  to  the  first  period  which  is  super- 
seded and  passed  away  forever.  Here  the  contrast  be- 
tween the  first  and  the  second  Adam  appears  as  one  of 
nature:  Adam  is  earthly,  Christ  is  heavenly.  Later  on, 
however,  the  contrast  is  presented  as  in  reference  to  con- 
duct: Adam  was  disobedient,  Christ  obedient  even  unto 
death.  And  this  brings  us  to  another  view  of  the  origin 
of  sin  than  the  one  previously  set  forth.  Sin  now  is  not 
inherent  in  the  constitution  of  humanity;  its  source  is 
traced  to  the  Eden-myth  and  it  is  derived  by  heredity 
from  the  disobedient  Adam.  "By  one  man  sin  entered 
into  the  world  and  death  by  sin,  and  so  death  passed  upon 
all  men  for  that  all  sinned."  On  the  principle  of  the 
solidarity  of  the  race  the  transgression  of  its  representa- 
tive, the  first  man,  is  placed  to  the  account  of  all  his 
descendants,  so  that  in  effect  each  one  of  them  is  held 
to  have  committed  it  himself.1  This  theory,  foreign  to 
the  canonical  Old  Testament,  is  that  of  the  Pharisaic 
theology,  and  Paul  adopts  it  because  it  serves  his  purpose 

1  "A  great  part  is  played  in  this  theology  by  the  thought  that  what 
happens  to  the  first  of  a  historical  series  happens  in  consequence  to  the  whole 
series.  Adam  is  the  headspring  of  humanity;  since  he  died  all  who  belong 
to  his  race  also  die.  Again,  Christ  is  the  first  of  a  series;  since  he  rises  from 
the  dead  all  rise  with  him.  We  can  see  no  reason  whatever  for  such  deduc- 
tions from  the  leader  of  a  line  to  those  that  follow  him.  We  ask  why  has 
the  experience  of  Adam  or  of  Christ  such  an  effect  on  other  men.  For 
Paul  the  matter  is  one  of  immediate  evidence;  in  other  words,  he  thinks 
under  a  law  which  does  not  obtain  for  us."  Wrede,  Paul,  81-82. 


n8  Paulinism 

in  his  exposition  of  the  Atonement.  Elsewhere  he  gives 
us  the  doctrine,  original  with  himself,  that  sin  belongs 
essentially  to  the  nature  of  man  in  that  he  is  flesh,  and, 
therefore,  Adam's  volition  need  not  be  called  in  to  set 
against  the  good  a  nature  already  opposed  to  it.  These 
theories  are  mutually  exclusive :  one  must  choose  between 
the  two.  Was  the  Fall  the  cause  of  Sin,  or  Sin  the  cause 
of  the  Fall?  If  sin  entered  with  Adam's  fall,  then  it  was 
not  a  primordial  constituent  of  Adam's  nature,  and  the 
doctrine  of  "sinful  flesh"  goes  by  the  board.  If  on 
the  other  hand  that  doctrine  be  accepted,  then,  since  the 
transgression  worked  no  change  in  a  human  nature 
essentially  sinful,  there  can  have  been  no  fall  of  man — 
there  was  no  height  of  primal  innocence  from  which  to 
fall.  Paul  ignores  the  dilemma  and  goes  from  one  position 
to  the  other  as  either  best  suits  the  occasion. I 

The  original  doctrine  finds  support  in  his  consideration 
of  the  relations  of  Sin  and  Law.  The  proclivity  to  sin, 
the  sinful  impulse,  exists  before  moral  consciousness. 
This  arises  when  law  dictates  the  course  of  action. 

Man  now  fulfils  the  impulse  of  the  flesh  against  his  better 
knowledge,  and  thus  sin  becomes  transgression  and  guilt 
may  be  imputed.  Yet  man  was  incapable  of  doing  otherwise. 
Sin  is  a  necessity  of  human  nature  because  it  is  a  property  of 
the  flesh,  and  man  can  no  more  free  himself  from  sin  than  from 
his  physical  frame. 2 

Law,  an  outward  authority,  exacts  absolute  obedience 
to  its  behests,  and  goes  no  farther.  It  gives  man  a  moral 
criterion  of  his  actions,  but  it  gives  him  no  power  to  con- 

1  Pfleiderer  (Primitive  Christianity,  i,  103-104)  notes  six  other  instances 
of  contradiction  in  the  Apostle's  doctrinal  statements;  it  is  plain  that  all 
are  due  to  the  presuppositions  of  different  lines  of  thought,  that  they  can- 
not be  harmonised  and  must  be  left  to  stand  as  they  are. 

3  Hausrath,  The  Time  of  the  Apostles,  iii,  89. 


Paulinism  119 

form  to  it.  It  wakens  the  consciousness  of  sin  and  the 
sense  of  moral  responsibility — "I  had  not  known  sin 
except  through  law" — but  it  leaves  man  hopelessly 
bound  and  fettered  to  his  sinful  nature,  with  the  sole 
result  that  actions  formerly  indifferent  are  now  known 
to  be  unlawful  and  as  such  render  him  guilty.  For  there 
is  no  overt  sin  without  law;  "Apart  from  law  sin  was 
dead";  that  is,  it  was  dormant,  existing  only  virtually 
and  not  actually.  ' '  When  the  commandment  came  sin  re- 
vived ";  the  definite  prohibitions  of  law  provoke  self-asser- 
tion, incite  the  sensual  impulses,  multiply  the  occasions 
of  sin  and  perpetuate  the  tragic  experience  of  peremp- 
tory provocations,  rebellious  desires,  unequal  struggles 
and  inevitable  defeats  which  is  pictured  in  Romans  vii. 
Thus  "the  development  initiated  by  law  can  only  lead 
further  and  further  from  God"  (Hausrath).  To  be 
under  the  law  is  the  same  as  to  be  under  the  dominion  of 
sin,  and  in  another  Letter  we  have  the  summary  statement : 
"the  power  of  sin  is  the  law." 

So  then  the  moral  law  which  ought  to  bring  men  to 
salvation  leads  to  an  opposite  result.  In  the  internecine 
conflict  between  the  "law  in  the  members"  and  the  "law 
of  the  mind  "  the  inward  man  succumbs,  falls  into  captivity 
to  the  law  of  sin  and  can  only  cry  for  deliverance  from  this 
body  of  death.  Being  naturally  carnal  (aapxivo?)  man  is 
morally  carnal  (aap>ux6<;) — that  is,  his  moral  activity  is 
determined  by  his  carnal  nature ;  hence  it  remains  forever 
impossible  that  by  his  utmost  endeavor  a  man  should 
attain  to  the  righteousness  required  by  the  Law,  and  the 
endeavor  leads  only  to  despair.1  No  wonder  the  Jewish 
Christians  found  this  a  startling  proposition.  From  the 

1  "Sin  is  for  Paul  so  terrible  a  power,  so  immeasurably  stronger  than 
the  natural  will,  that  he  cannot  think  of  it  as  the  result  of  the  freedom  of 
man,  but  as  the  cause  of  his  enslavement."  Pfleiderer,  Primitive  Chris- 
tianity, i,  280. 


120  Paulinism 

Old  Testament  point  of  view  the  Law  was  given  to  be 
obeyed,  and  the  obedience  which  constituted  men's 
righteousness  was  of  course  within  their  power.  All  the 
warnings  and  exhortations  of  sages  and  prophets  from 
age  to  age  were  meaningless  if  righteousness  were  an 
ideal  to  be  delighted  in  but  hopeless  of  realisation.  And 
the  notion  of  sin  as  a  bondage  to  which  the  soul  is  con- 
demned in  perpetuity  no  more  accords  with  the  moral 
intuition  of  Israel  than  it  does  with  human  experience. 
Ezekiel  assumes  the  contrary:  "If  the  wicked  man  will 
turn  from  his  sins  that  he  hath  committed  and  do  that 
which  is  right,  his  transgressions  shall  not  be  mentioned 
unto  him."  Paul  denies  that  man  can  turn  from  sin,  and 
a  fortiori  he  is  unable  to  do  that  which  is  right.  The 
truth  is,  the  Apostle's  contention  was  for  him  a  doctrinal 
necessity.  He  looked  from  the  Cross  backward  to  the 
Law;  righteousness  could  not  be  attainable  by  the  works 
of  the  Law,  for  "if  righteousness  come  by  the  Law,  then 
Christ  is  dead  in  vain."  He  admits  that  the  Law  is 
"holy,  just  and  good,"1  and  that  men  would  become 
righteous  if  they  obeyed  it,  but  this  was  just  what  they 
could  never  do.  From  this  impotence  it  results  that 
"the  commandment  which  was  ordained  to  life  is  found 
to  be  unto  death."  That  is,  the  effect  of  the  Law  is  di- 
rectly contrary  to  its  design ;  in  other  words  the  divine  ordi- 
nance fails  of  its  purpose.  But  arriving  at  this  hazardous 
position,  our  theologian  changes  ground  and  goes  on  to 
argue  that  it  was  not  the  object  of  the  Law  to  make  men 
righteous,  but  the  divine  purpose  in  giving  it  must  be 
found  in  its  necessary  effect,  and  that  is  the  increase  and 

1  This  in  Romans,  although  in  Galatians  those  who  observe  the  Law 
are  no  better  than  heathen.  And  if  it  be  said  that  the  reference  in  the  one 
case  is  to  the  moral  and  in  the  other  to  the  ceremonial  Law,  the  answer 
is  that  the  Apostle  never  recognises  any  such  distinction;  in  his  eyes  the 
Law  is  an  indivisible  whole  of  divine  revelation. 


Paulinism  121 

intensification  of  sin.  As  we  have  seen,  law  is  not  only 
powerless  to  make  men  righteous,  it  conspires  with  the 
flesh  against  him  and  is  active  in  making  him  a  sinner. 
It  was  given,  then,  the  Apostle  concludes,  for  this  very 
purpose,  given  to  make  actual  what  was  virtual,  to  make 
the  latent  sinf ulness  open  sin  as  a  violation  of  law.  ' '  The 
real  object  of  the  Law  was  simply  to  keep  mankind  in  sin  " 
(Hausrath).  "It  was  added  for  the  sake  of  transgres- 
sions"— that  is,  to  create  transgressions  (Lightfoot,  Gal. 
iii,  19).  "It  came  in  that  the  trespass  might  abound"; 
it  is  through  the  commandment  that  sin  becomes  exceeding 
sinful :  and  sin  works  death.  So  then  the  Law  is  not  only 
"found"  to  be  unto  death,  but  was  "ordained"  to  death 
and  not  to  life.  For  a  moment  this  doctrine  of  law  seems 
to  show  a  cheering  aspect  when  we  read,  "Where  no  law  is 
there  is  no  transgression.  .  .  .  Sin  is  not  imputed  when  there 
is  no  law."  This  would  seem  to  clear  the  Gentiles  of  all 
guilt,  since  the  Law  was  given  only  to  Israel.  Yet  in  the 
face  of  this  we  are  told  that  "as  many  as  have  sinned 
without  law  shall  also  perish  without  law."  The  Gentiles, 
it  appears,  are  responsible  to  an  inward  law  of  conscience, 
as  "knowing  the  judgment  of  God  that  they  who  commit 
such  things  are  worthy  of  death";  and  hence  "death 
reigned  from  Adam  to  Moses  even  over  them  that  had 
not  sinned  after  the  likeness  of  Adam's  transgression" — 
that  is,  against  an  express  commandment.  In  fact  then 
there  is  no  time  or  place  "where  no  law  is,"  and  always 
and  everywhere  sin  is  imputed.  The  general  result  ap- 
pears to  be  that  as  concerns  sin  it  does  not  really  matter 
whether  there  is  law  or  no  law.  It  seems  unnecessary 
that  law  should  be  added  to  create  transgressions,  since 
with  or  without  it  all  mankind  are  "concluded  under  sin." 
In  the  Apostle's  deliverances  concerning  death  we  find 
the  same  vacillation  as  in  the  case  of  sin  between  two 
different  points  of  view.  On  the  one  hand,  it  is  of  his 


122  Paulinism 

constitution  that  man  is  mortal;  by  the  necessity  of  his 
nature  he  is  subject  to  death.  The  first  man  is  of  the 
earth,  earthy,  and  in  Adam  all  die.  On  the  other  hand, 
that  death  came  upon  men  as  the  penalty  of  sin  is  a 
proposition  essential  to  the  Apostle's  theological  scheme, 
with  its  two  successive  dispensations,  that  of  sin  and 
death  which  begins  with  the  progenitor  of  the  human 
family,  and  that  of  redemption  to  life  whose  head  is  the 
second  Adam,  the  Man  from  heaven.  These  are  conflict- 
ing views.  It  is  disconcerting  to  find  the  Apostle  at  one 
time  holding  with  the  old  Hebraism  that  death  is  the  fate 
of  man  as  man,  and  in  no  wise  conditional  upon  his  action, 
and  at  another  that  it  is  the  divine  judgment  upon  sin. 
It  may  be  remarked  in  passing  that  if  we  accept  the 
Pauline  theology,  any  divine  judgment  upon  sin  must 
appear  the  height  of  injustice.  Whether  sin  belongs 
essentially  to  the  human  nature  man  has  received  from 
his  Creator,  or  to  the  corrupted  nature  he  has  inherited 
from  his  primeval  ancestor,  in  neither  case  can  man  be 
guilty,  for  it  is  not  his  sin.  It  is  not  chargeable  to  his 
free  activity  and  therefore  he  cannot  be  held  responsible 
for  it.  He  cannot  justly  be  condemned  to  death  for 
simply  being  the  thing  he  was  made  to  be.  Rather  he 
might  indignantly  demand  by  what  right  did  God  give 
him  a  sinful  nature,  directly  or  through  another,  and  then 
hold  him  an  object  of  His  wrath  for  having  it. 

Let  us  note  that  if  we  are  careful  not  to  read  our  thoughts 
into  the  mind  of  Paul  we  shall  not  find  him  using  the 
word  death  in  a  figurative  sense  to  signify  loss  of  spiritural 
vitality,  of  the  will  to  do  good.  Death  in  the  passage,  "to 
be  carnally  minded  is  death,"  means  simply  physical 
death,  final  extinction,  without  possibility  of  a  resurrec- 
tion life.  This  is  the  inevitable  end  of  the  mind  of  the 
flesh  which  is  "enmity  against  God";  and  the  Jew,  with 
his  horror  of  death  more  intense  than  that  of  any  other 


Paulinism  123 

race  of  men,  could  scarcely  conceive  a  more  appalling 
fate.  So  with  the  antithetic  term:  the  "life"  given  at 
the  resurrection  is  not  a  spiritual  regeneration,  but  the 
clothing  of  the  man  who  dies  in  Christ  with  a  body  of 
glory  for  the  new  Kingdom.  Life,  the  miraculous  trans- 
formation of  a  mortal  nature,  is  for  "those  who  are  Christ's 
at  his  coming."  When  the  trumpet  shall  sound  at  the 
last  day  the  dead  will  be  raised  incorruptible — in  the 
spiritual  body — and  the  living  will  be  "changed"  cor- 
respondingly by  the  putting  on  of  incorruption.  It  is 
above  all  the  believers'  relation  to  Christ  at  the  Parousia 
that  preoccupies  the  Apostle's  thought,  and  his  hope 
repeatedly  expressed  is  that  they  will  be  found  "unre- 
proveable  in  the  day  of  the  Lord."  He  tells  them  that 
if  the  Spirit  dwells  in  them  it  will  quicken  their  mortal 
bodies ;  therefore  they  should  not  live  after  the  flesh.  They 
should  walk  in  newness  of  life,  for  if  they  have  become 
united  with  Christ  in  his  death  they  will  be  also  in  his 
resurrection.  The  Pauline  terms  "death"  and  "life" 
will  be  misunderstood  if  they  are  not  interpreted  in  the 
light  of  the  messianic  eschatology.  It  is  in  reference  to 
the  approaching  "end"  which  fixes  the  gaze  of  the  Apostle 
that  these  terms  receive  their  intense  significance  and  all 
else  becomes  dust  in  the  balance.  The  gift  of  eternal 
life  means  admission  to  the  messianic  Kingdom  which 
flesh  and  blood  cannot  inherit,  and  to  joys  it  hath  not 
entered  the  heart  of  man  to  conceive.  And  this  becomes 
the  goal  of  the  believers'  striving.  All  their  steadfast- 
ness, their  hoping,  their  enduring,  their  eager  waiting  for 
the  coming  of  the  Lord  are  animated  and  sustained  by 
their  assurance  that  they  shall  be  "glorified  with  him." 
Thus  it  becomes  evident  that  the  righteousness  of  the 
Christian  is  not  regarded  as  an  end  in  itself,  but  its  end  is 
thrown  forward  to  the  great  consummation  in  the  "day 
of  the  Lord."  It  is  Life  that  is  the  highest  end.  Right- 


124  Paulinism 

eousness  is  the  means  through  which  "grace  reigns  unto 
eternal  life,"  and  the  "justification  of  life"  is  such  an 
attribution  of  righteousness  as  will  pass  the  Christian 
through  the  gates  of  the  Kingdom. 

Evidently  then  the  meaning  of  "Salvation"  in  the 
Apostle's  terminology  is  determined  by  that  of  life  and 
death  to  which  it  relates.  Salvation  is  clearly  an  eschato- 
logical  term  and  stands  for  deliverance  from  that  worst  of 
evils,  the  messianic  "perishing"  or  "destruction, "  and 
entrance  into  the  resurrection  life,  freed  from  subjection 
to  the  body.  Nothing  is  plainer  than  that  salvation 
belongs  to  the  messianic  "age  to  come."  He  that  is 
to  be  saved  will  be  "saved  in  the  day  of  the  Lord,"  and 
what  we  have  here  is  the  promise  and  the  hope  of  salva- 
tion. If  the  Gentiles  have  turned  from  idols  to  serve 
the  living  God,  it  is  to  "wait  for  his  Son  from  heaven  who 
delivers  us  from  the  wrath  to  come."  As  with  pious 
Jews,  like  Simeon  of  St.  Luke's  gospel,  this  "waiting" 
would  seem  to  be  the  Christian's  occupation.  Life  in 
the  body,  in  "this  present  evil  world,"  was  something 
merely  to  escape  from:  "Our  citizenship  is  in  heaven 
whence  we  wait  for  a  Saviour,  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  who 
shall  fashion  anew  the  body  of  our  humiliation  that  it 
may  be  conformed  to  the  body  of  his  glory."  Salvation 
then  is  primarily  not  salvation  from  sin,  but  from  the 
penalty  of  sin.  It  does  not  relate  to  character;  it  is 
not  something  to  be  achieved;  it  is  a  gracious  gift  of  God 
to  those  whom  He  has  "elected." 

Coming  now  to  what  is  called  the  "plan  of  salvation, " 
we  find  to  begin  with  that  all  men  are  "under  sin,"  and 
hence  the  relation  between  man  and  God  is  one  of  mutual 
hostility.  Sinful  men  are  "enemies"  of  God,  and  "the 
wrath  of  God  is  revealed  against  all  unrighteousness  of 
men."  The  human  race  is  doomed  to  destruction  and 
nothing  can  save  it  but  the  Atonement  of  the  Christ. 


Paulinism  125 

The  object  of  his  death  is  to  counteract  the  effects  of 
Adam's  sin  and  so  bring  about  a  reconciliation  of  God  and 
man.  It  is  not  St.  Paul's  teaching  that  a  change  of  man's 
disposition  toward  God  would  be  all-sufficient  to  this 
end.  On  the  contrary  the  change  of  disposition  on  God's 
part,  which  is  wrought  by  the  Atonement,  is  the  sole 
effect  of  the  transaction.  He  would  not  lay  aside  the 
wrath  that  pursues  the  sinner  to  destruction  until  the 
demands  of  His  justice  were  satisfied  by  the  atoning  sacri- 
fice through  which  "Christ  redeemed  us  from  the  curse  of 
the  Law."  To  redeem  is  to  buy  off:  by  his  death  Christ 
pays  the  price  of  men's  deliverance  from  bondage  to  the 
Law,  whose  curse,  the  doom  of  death,  rests  upon  the 
unhappy  race  which  by  its  very  nature  is  incapable  of 
obeying  it.  The  ransom  is  evidently  paid  to  the  Law, 
the  abstraction  of  divine  justice — '  'personified  as  a  tyrannic 
power"  (Pfleiderer) — and  the  Law,  being  once  for  all 
satisfied,  is  abolished:  "Christ  is  the  end  of  the  Law." 
We  may  note  in  passing  the  curious  arguments  that  lead 
to  this  conclusion.  It  was  written  that  the  transgressor 
of  the  Law  is  accursed,  and  accursed  also  is  everyone  that 
is  hanged  upon  a  tree.  Christ  who  hung  upon  the  tree 
became  a  curse  for  us ;  thus  our  transgression  has  received 
its  punishment  and  we  are  freed  from  the  Law.  Then 
there  is  the  analogy  of  the  marriage  relation.  Death 
puts  an  end  to  marriage,  and  in  like  manner  we  who  in 
the  death  of  Christ  are  dead  to  the  Law  are  now  free  men. 
Now  Jesus  is  indeed  the  end  of  the  Law,  for  the  religion 
of  the  spirit  which  he  taught  is  in  itself  the  transcendence 
of  legalism,  but  "this  manner  of  argumentation,  how 
vain  and  naught  it  is,  everyone  that  hath  wit  perceiveth." 
In  the  same  manner  as  from  the  Law  men  are  redeemed 
from  bondage  to  sin.  Christ  "died  unto  sin,"  a  sort  of 
quasi-personal  ruling  power — a  "demonic  spiritual  being" 
(Pfleiderer) — which  claims  the  death  of  mankind.  By 


126  Paulinism 

his  death  he  satisfies  and  annuls  this  claim,  pays  the  tribute 
which  was  due,  and  brings  to  an  end  the  dominion  of 
sin.  According  to  the  principle  of  solidarity  this  sub- 
stitutional  sacrifice  is  the  act  of  a  representative  of  man- 
kind in  which  mankind  participates.  ' '  If  one  died  for  all, 
then  all  died";  that  is,  the  Christ's  real  death  is  ideally 
the  death  of  all  men.  He  suffered  the  condemnation  of 
sin  in  the  flesh,  died  unto  sin  "once, "  and  in  virtue  of  their 
ideal  dying  in  his  death  men  are  "freed  from  sin,  and 
being  now  justified  by  his  blood  they  will  be  saved  from 
wrath  through  him."  Sin  appears  to  be  the  germinal 
principle  of  Paul's  theology  from  which  it  all  develops.  It 
is  the  doctrine  of  sin  that  necessitates  all  the  machinery 
of  external  contrivances  to  effect  a  reconciliation  of  God 
and  man  which  but  for  that  doctrine  were  needless;  and 
then  as  the  issue  of  a  series  of  mystical  transactions  in 
which  he  himself  takes  no  part,  but  which  "enable  him 
to  settle  with  the  Shylock  in  the  skies, "  a  man  is  brought 
into  the  status  of  "justification."  We  hear  no  echo  of 
Jesus'  words,  thy  sins  are  forgiven  thee;  forgiveness  is  a 
matter  of  personal  relations;  law  knows  no  forgiveness, 
Justification  means  acquittal  at  the  messianic  judgment; 
at  the  same  time,  the  justified  are  not  only  pronounced 
guiltless,  but  on  the  principle  of  imputation  of  merit, 
they  are  accounted  righteous.  They  are 

accepted  as  righteous  freely  by  God's  grace  through  the 
redemption  which  is  in  Christ  Jesus;  whom  God  set  forth  in 
his  blood  as  a  propitiation,  through  faith,  in  order  to  manifest 
(both)  His  righteousness  on  account  of  His  passing  over  in  His 
forbearance  the  sins  committed  in  former  times,  and  His 
righteousness  at  the  present  time ;  so  that  He  may  be  righteous 
and  accept  as  righteous  him  who  belie veth. 

In  His  passing  over  unpunished  the  sins  of  pre-Christian 
times  the  righteousness  of  God  was  in  abeyance  and 


Paulinism  127 

indiscernible,  but  now  the  pains  of  the  guiltless  sufferer, 
having  a  retroactive  efficacy,  show  that  He  is  at  once  just 
in  requiring  an  atonement  and  has  the  right  to  be  gracious 
in  becoming  "the  justifier  of  him  that  believeth  in  Jesus." 
That  is,  though  the  divine  justice  might  be  called  in 
question  for  apparently  pardoning  the  guilty,  it  is  now 
vindicated  by  His  punishing  the  innocent.  A  modern 
theologian  will  find  it  hard  to  found  on  any  rational 
principle  the  singular  doctrine  of  the  text,  but  for  one 
with  no  dogmatic  interest  to  serve  these  are  simply  the 
speculations  of  a  Jew  of  the  first  century  striving  to  adapt 
the  theories  of  the  Schools  to  assumed  facts,  and  he  will 
be  content  to  take  them  as  he  finds  them. 

It  was  the  messianic  doctrine  that  only  the  righteous 
could  gain  admission  to  the  Kingdom.  Paul  finds  this 
proposition  confronted  by  two  others  equally  indisput- 
able: that  no  man  is  by  nature  righteous,  and  that  no 
man  can  become  righteous  by  any  efforts  of  his  own.  It 
follows  that  his  righteousness  must  be  accomplished  by 
the  Messiah  himself.  And  so  while  Pharisaic  theology 
held  that  the  Messiah  would  only  come  when  the  people 
should  be  found  obedient  to  the  law  of  righteousness, 
according  to  Paul  he  comes  to  bring  them  righteousness. 
What  in  one  doctrine  is  the  condition  of  the  coming  in  the 
other  becomes  its  effect.  Adopting  the  idea  of  the 
transference  of  merit  which  runs  all  through  the  Old 
Testament,1  Paul  assumes  an  imputation  of  Christ's 
righteousness  to  man  consequent  upon  that  of  man's 
sin  to  Christ:  God  "made  him  to  be  sin  for  us  who 
knew  no  sin  that  we  might  become  the  righteousness  of 
God  in  him."  That  is,  Christ  takes  men's  sin  and  men 
take  his  righteousness.  It  is  all  a  legal  fiction:  men  are 

1  It  was  developed  in  detail  in  the  later  theology,  and  the  doctrine  that 
the  credit  balance  of  holy  men  might  be  made  over  to  needy  sinners  passed 
thence  to  the  Christian  Church. 


128  Paulinism 

still  as  far  from  being  really  righteous  as  Christ  is  from 
being  really  a  sinner.  There  being  no  such  thing,  a  man's 
personal  righteousness  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  divine 
decree  of  his  justification.  Having  none  of  his  own  he 
" appropriates"  that  of  another,  and  the  righteousness  of 
Christ  is  put  to  his  credit.  This  is  an  ethic  of  burlesque. 
If  morality  has  any  meaning  the  notion  that  righteousness 
can  be  handed  over  as  a  present  from  one  person  to  another 
is  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  word  absurd. 

We  must  turn  to  another  side  of  the  Apostle's  doctrine 
to  complete  our  view  of  it,  though  the  trouble  is  the  two 
sides  go  very  ill  together.  There  are  two  further  points 
in  this  theory  of  the  Atonement  which,  however  incon- 
sistent they  may  be  with  its  underlying  principles,  are 
nevertheless  a  part  of  it.  In  the  first  place,  it  is  a  surprise 
to  learn  that  it  is  the  inexorable  God  of  justice  and  wrath 
who  out  of  His  love  for  sinners  has  Himself  devised  the 
plan  of  atonement  for  human  sin.  The  Cross  is  no  longer 
witness  to  the  stern  demand  of  offended  justice,  but  the 
symbol  of  divine  "grace."  Here  we  encounter  a  flat 
contradiction.  "For  the  Apostle  the  wrath  of  God 
against  sinners  was  a  reality  to  reconcile  which  with  the 
fact  that  He  had  given  His  Son  to  die  for  them  was  a 
puzzle  he  saw  no  way  to  solve."1  And  there  is  no  solu- 
tion: it  is  impossible  to  maintain  both  doctrines  at  once. 
In  this  new  aspect  the  harshness  and  hardness  of  the 
doctrine  of  atonement  disappear,  but  along  with  these 
the  doctrine  itself  disappears  and  the  whole  exposition  of 
it  falls  to  the  ground.  The  love  of  God  who  gave  His 
own  Son  to  die  for  us  annuls  the  presupposition  of  the 
atonement  theory  and  does  away  with  all  necessity  for 
propitiatory  sacrifice  to  appease  a  wrathful  Deity.  The 
Christ  has  effected  no  reconciliation  of  God  to  man, 

•Mackintosh,  op.  tit.,  398. 


Paulinism  129 

for  the  reconciliation  antedates  his  sacrifice,  and  that 
sacrifice  becomes  superfluous  and  meaningless.  A  loving 
God  is  a  forgiving  God,  one  who  knowing  our  frame  and 
remembering  that  we  are  dust  will  put  our  sins  away 
from  us  as  far  as  the  East  is  from  the  West.  It  is  another 
God  who  insists  upon  the  death  of  a  victim  and  will 
grant  no  remission  without  shedding  of  blood.  These 
two  Gods,  who  logically  cancel  one  another,  appear  as 
one  in  the  Pentateuch,  where  we  read  of  "the  Lord 
merciful  and  gracious  that  will  by  no  means  clear  the 
guilty";  and  the  dualistic  conception  seems  to  result 
from  the  persistence  of  antithetic  states  of  religious 
feeling.  Hence  arises  the  anthropomorphic  distinction 
between  the  justice  and  the  mercy  of  God,  and  the  in- 
consistency of  the  Pauline  theory  of  redemption  results 
from  these  conflicting  elements  of  the  divine  nature  as 
thus  misapprehended. 

In  the  second  place,  it  belongs  to  the  theory  of  atone- 
ment that  the  beneficiaries  -are  passive  recipients  of  the 
absolution  gained  by  the  vicarious  sacrifice,  and  it  comes 
to  them  unconditionally.  Such  is  the  theory  which  Paul 
sets  forth,  and  according  to  this  mankind  has  nothing  to 
do  in  the  Atonement,  the  entire  transaction  being  con- 
ducted by  God  and  the  Christ.  It  is  an  objective  act  of 
propitiation  on  behalf  of  all  men,  or  ideally  by  all  men  as 
represented  in  their  Head.  To  this  view  of  the  matter 
as  something  taking  place  apart  from  the  individual,  or 
over  his  head,  Paul  does  not  adhere.  He  brings  forward 
a  subjective  complement  as  necessary  to  the  efficacy  of 
the  Atonement.  Its  benefits  are  not  unconditional,  but 
accrue  only  to  those  who  have  "faith"  in  Christ.  Upon 
all  others  will  come  "sudden  destruction  in  the  day  of 
the  Lord."  Justification  by  his  blood  is  something  only 
offered  to  all  men,  but  not  accepted  by  all  and  of  no  avail 
to  those  who  do  not  accept  it.  Two  comments  suggest 

9 


130  Paulinism 

themselves :  We  have  been  taught  that  the  second  Adam 
comes  to  repair  the  evil  wrought  by  the  first,  and  as  the 
one  brought  death  upon  humanity,  it  is  to  humanity  that 
the  other  brings  salvation:  "As  in  Adam  all  die,  so  also 
in  Christ  shall  all  be  made  alive."  Now  it  appears  that 
deliverance  from  death  is  not  a  common  gift  to  all  in- 
heritors of  Adam's  guilt,  but  only  to  the  group  of  believers 
in  Jesus  as  the  Christ.  Again,  the  ideas  of  substitution 
and  representation  rest  on  that  of  clan  solidarity:  they 
belong  to  a  time  when  the  individual  has  no  existence  as 
such,  but  is  only  a  member  of  the  clan;  and  hence  the 
notion  that  the  efficacy  of  an  atoning  sacrifice  is  condi- 
tioned by  any  subjective  belief  is  an  anachronism  which 
has  no  place  in  the  judicial  theory  of  atonement,  or  rather 
it  destroys  its  foundation  and  wrecks  it  altogether. 
Since  however  to  Paul's  mind  the  divine  plan  of  salvation 
centres  in  the  Cross,  he  cannot  abandon  that  theory,  and 
his  exposition  includes  the  radical  inconsistency  of  this 
conditioning  faith.  It  is  because  of  the  sacrificial  death  of 
Christ — the  satisfaction  of  the  Law,  the  condemnation  of 
sin  in  the  flesh — that  the  Christian  is  reckoned  righteous 
on  condition  of  his  faith.  This  is  to  limit  the  scope  of  the 
Atonement,  but  not  to  change  the  ground  of  justification. 
That  remains  the  free  gift  of  God,  just  as  the  Atonement 
is  His  provision,  and  the  subjective  factor,  though  in- 
dispensable, is  not  productively  effective.  In  Paul's 
theology  this  faith  which  is  demanded  of  the  Christian 
is  simply  assent  to  the  preaching  of  redemption  and 
acceptance  of  Christ  as  his  Saviour  (Rom.  iv,  24-25). 
With  this  the  death  and  resurrection  of  Christ  are  auto- 
matically transferred  to  the  faithful,  so  that  they  too  are 
dead  and  risen  again.  Thus  the  believer's  attitude 
toward  his  justification  remains  purely  receptive.  Indeed 
faith  itself  is  of  grace ;  it  is  the  gift  of  God  to  whomsoever 
He  will.  If  it  were  an  action  it  would  be  a  spiritual 


Paulinism  131 

action,  and  of  such  the  flesh  which  lusteth  against  the 
spirit  is  incapable. 

The  doctrines  of  grace  and  predestination  exclude  any 
co-operation  on  the  part  of  man  in  the  work  of  redemption. 
If  God  determines  who  is  to  belong  to  the  saved  and  to  the 
lost,  then  faith  as  a  condition  of  salvation  must  be  reckoned 
as  part  of  that  which  God  decrees.1 

Thus  the  believer  is  simply  brought  into  a  new  relation 
to  God  who  is  pleased  to  declare  him  righteous  "without 
the  deeds  of  the  Law."  That  is,  apart  from  his  actual 
righteousness,  without  regard  to  his  moral  character, 
faith  is  reckoned  as  the  equivalent  of  a  devoted  obedience 
to  the  moral  law.  This  unmoral  doctrine  of  justification 
by  faith,  with  its  disparagement  of  "works"  as  futile, 
has  well  been  called  one  of  St.  Paul's  most  disastrous 
creations,  for  nothing  has  done  more  to  divorce  religion 
from  morality. 

It  is  true  that  in  the  Apostle's  own  experience  the  term 
faith  passes  from  theology  to  religion,  and  signifies  a 
realising  in  the  personal  soul  of  that  union  with  the 
Christ  which  on  the  theory  of  representation  is  only 
generic  and  ideal.  In  this  mystical  communion  the 
Christian  feels  that  it  is  no  longer  he  that  lives,  but  the 
Christ,  or  the  Spirit  of  God,  that  lives  within  him,  and 
from  a  "new  creation"  issues  a  life  of  holiness.  St. 
Paul's  religion,  like  all  that  is  in  truth  religion,  is  deep 
and  true  and  vital.  For  himself,  as  afterwards  for  Luther, 
the  righteousness  of  faith  was  a  living  reality.  Yet 
psychologically  the  Pauline  faith  is  the  feeling  of  the  soul's 
union  with  Christ,  and  there  is  danger  in  merging  all 
in  the  element  of  feeling;  for  the  generality  of  men  the 
Pauline  mysticism  is  apt  to  prove  a  delusion  and  a  snare. 

1  Wernle,  The  Beginnings  of  Christianity,  i,  269. 


132  Paulinism 

Again,  the  missionary  activities  of  the  Apostle  compel 
him  to  lay  aside  his  theoretical  determinism,  and  his 
ethical  teaching  is  an  urgent  call  to  self-discipline  and  the 
higher  life.  Yet  these  exhortations  to  the  Christian 
virtues,  implying  a  recognition  of  free  will  and  moral 
obligation,  touch  a  note  strangely  discordant  with  the 
theological  expositions  amidst  which  they  occur,  for  in 
truth  his  theology  does  not  allow  of  any  ethical  teaching 
whatever.  The  natural  man,  it  declares,  is  powerless 
under  his  servitude  to  the  flesh  and  its  indwelling  sinful- 
ness;  he  cannot  liberate  himself,  nor  escape  the  doom  of 
sin.  He  must  be  saved  by  another,  and  the  whole  process 
of  salvation  becomes  a  supernatural  one.  The  laws  of 
moral  and  religious  growth  are  set  aside,  and  a  righteous- 
ness unattainable  by  man  is  supernaturally  conferred 
upon  him;  for  since  the  Christ  died  unto  sin  that  reigned 
unto  death  and  to  the  Law  that  made  sin  "abound, "  it  is 
now  possible  to  introduce  a  new  world-order,  the  reign 
of  grace  and  imputed  righteousness  unto  eternal  life. 
In  all  this  there  is  no  place  for  human  freedom.  Man  is 
clay  in  the  hands  of  the  potter,  and  all  is  of  God:  "Whom 
He  did  predestinate  He  also  called,  and  whom  He  called 
He  also  justified,  and  whom  He  justified  He  also  glorified. ' ' x 
If  then  we  find  St.  Paul  condemning  men  for  their  evil 
conduct,  or  urging  them  to  the  activities  of  righteous- 
ness, quite  as  if  he  looked  on  them  as  moral  agents,  and 
not  as  the  stone  that  is  thrown  and  thinks  it  flies,  we  see 
that  the  theory  of  supernaturalism  cannot  stand  the 

1  "  The  nomination  of  men  to  salvation  or  perdition  is  quite  as  arbitrary 
a  proceeding  as  a  potter's  decision  respecting  the  shape  of  a  pitcher.  God 
'  hath  mercy  on  whom  He  will,  and  whom  He  will  He  hardeneth. '  Men  are 
therefore  irresponsible  automata  controlled  by  destiny,  and  no  presumptu- 
ous mortal  has  any  right  to  question  the  divine  justice  which  determines 
the  perdition  of  unborn  millions  as  a  foregone  conclusion,  and  limits 
salvation  to  a  divinely  chosen  minority."  The  Evolution  of  Christianity, 
303. 


Paulinism  133 

strain  put  upon  it  by  the  exigencies  of  practical  life,  and 
we  find  that  the  righteousness  of  works,  so  vehemently 
repudiated  in  favor  of  a  justification  without  them, 
comes  to  its  rights  again.  We  meet  continually  this 
antinomy  of  a  twofold  righteousness,  one  imputed  and 
one  real,  and  we  recognise  that  sometimes  the  Apostle  is 
writing  under  the  obsession  of  a  dogmatic  thesis,  and 
sometimes  from  the  standpoint  of  actual  experience;  is 
now  giving  us  the  subtle  artificialities  of  his  modified 
Rabbinism,  and  now  living  words  that  spring  from  the 
intense  earnestness  of  his  own  spiritual  nature. 

Personally  the  glorious  Apostle  commands  our  fervent 
admiration;  save  one  there  is  scarcely  a  greater  name  in 
human  history.  His  theology — that  theology  which  has 
shaped  the  thought  of  Christendom  all  through  the  ages — 
is  another  matter.  It  was  the  Jewish  theology  in  which 
Paul  had  been  educated  with  modifications  from  his  ideas 
concerning  the  death  and  resurrection  of  the  Christ. 
Paul  remained  a  Jewish  thinker,  and  the  forms  of  Jewish 
thought  continued  to  mould  and  to  limit  the  dogmatic 
process  by  which  the  Christian  religion  was  substituted 
for  the  religion  of  Jesus.  The  whole  messianic  eschatology ; 
the  two  contrasted  aeons,  the  earthly  present  and  the 
heavenly  future;  the  doctrine  of  angels  and  demons; 
the  theories  of  predestination  and  God's  arbitrary  will; 
of  ethical  pessimism  and  the  universality  of  sin ;  of  Adam's 
fall  as  the  fall  of  all  men;  of  death  as  the  wages  of  sin — 
all  this  is  part  of  the  heritage  from  Judaism,  "and  it  is  a 
very  irony  that  such  specifically  Jewish  ideas  are  to-day 
widely  regarded  as  specifically  Christian."1  It  is  the 
profoundly  pessimistic  thought  of  later  Judaism  that 
appears  in  Paul's  gloomy  outlook  upon  a  world  lying  under 
the  blight  of  God's  curse  and  the  menace  of  His  wrath, 

'  Wrede,  Paul,  141. 


134  Paulinism 

in  which  he  sees  only  the  ruin  wrought  by  sin  and  the 
fatality  that  chains  man  to  the  life  of  sense.  These 
pessimistic  postulates  are  a  necessity  to  his  theory  of 
redemption. x  From  this  black  evil  of  man's  natural  state 
only  a  supernatural  deliverance  can  rescue  him.  It  is 
here  that  Paul  incurs  responsibility  for  a  fatal  delusion 
which  has  betrayed  generations  of  Christian  men:  the 
delusion  that  to  save  oneself  is  impossible  and  is  not 
necessary,  for  the  verb  is  to  be  construed  in  the  passive 
voice  and  men  will  be  saved  by  a  power  outside  them- 
selves. The  truth  is  plain  and  irreversible  that  no  man's 
soul  can  be  saved  by  another;  the  only  salvation  we  can 
know  is  self -regeneration. 2  The  whole  Pauline  scheme 
of  redemption  by  the  atoning  death  of  Christ,  a  transac- 
tion quite  apart  from  the  individual  soul,  wears  a  cold  and 
artificial  look,  and  more  than  that,  to  plain  people  whose 
moral  intuitions  have  not  been  silenced  by  a  doctrine 
supposedly  inspired  it  must  appear  fantastic,  irrational 
and  absurd.  Its  legal,  or  "forensic,"  aspect  masks  the 
wild  justice  of  primitive  barbarism  which  held  that  the 
proper  demand  of  an  injured  dignitary  was  a  fixed  equiva- 
lent of  suffering,  and  that  it  mattered  not  that  punishment 
should  fall  on  the  culprit,  but  only  that  it  should  fall 
upon  someone.3  Equally  lacking  in  common  sense  and 

1  "Paul  violently  extinguished  every  other  light  in  the  world  so  that 
Christ  might  shine  in  it  alone."     Wernle,  op.  cit.,  i,  237. 

2  "The  implicit  recognition  of  human  autonomy  in  the  teaching  of 
Jesus  is  as  much  as  to  say  that  his  method  of  deliverance  from  evil  is  auto- 
soteric — in  plain  terms  a  process  of  self-extrication,  of  self-redemption — a 
process  which  can  be  carried  out  only  by  that  struggle  of  man  himself 
with  his  own  lower  nature  of  which  the  Cross  is  the  symbol."     Mackintosh, 
op.  cit.,  80. 

s  At  the  Episcopal  Church  Congress  of  1885  one  of  the  writers  reminded 
the  audience  that  Jesus'  teaching  concerning  the  forgiveness  of  sin  was  to 
be  found  in  the  parable  of  the  Prodigal  Son,  and  he  added  the  remark: 
"If  we  find  anywhere  in  the  New  Testament  a  teaching  contrary  to  this, 
we  are  to  remember  that  we  have  but  one  Master."  Whereupon  a  zealous 


Paulinism  135 

equally  offensive  to  the  moral  instincts  is  the  cognate 
theory  of  justification  by  the  blood  of  the  guiltless,  of  a 
righteousness  imputed  and  the  appropriation  of  another's 
merits.  If  men  of  modern  education  are  told  that  their 
relations  to  God  are  ordered  on  such  principles  as  these, 
it  will  depend  upon  their  temperament  whether  they  re- 
spond with  indignant  protest  or  with  derisive  merriment. x 
It  has  been  the  prevalent  view  that  Paulinism  is  simply 
the  theological  exposition  of  the  Gospel  of  Jesus,  that  the 
two  differ  in  form  only  and  not  in  principle.  This  shows 
us,  it  seems  to  me,  how  strongly  and  how  strangely  un- 
conscious prepossession  can  sway  the  judgment.  Can 
there  be  a  sharper  contrast  than  that  between  the  Apostle's 
doctrine  and  the  message  of  Jesus:  between  the  satis- 
faction for  sin  by  the  death  of  a  victim  and  the  free  for- 
giveness of  repentant  sinners  by  their  loving  Father;  or 
between  the  Pauline  righteousness  by  a  legal  fiction  and 
the  personal  righteousness  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount?2 


Christian  exclaimed:  "After  that  I  don't  see  how  Dr. can  remain  in 

the  Episcopal  Church."  The  world  seems  to  have  made  but  slight  advance 
in  the  two  hundred  and  fifty  years  since  the  outcry  arose  against  Grotius 
for  preferring  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  to  the  doctrines  of  theologians,  when 
Voetius  declared  that  "to  place  the  principal  part  of  religion  in  the  observ- 
ance of  Christ's  commands  is  rank  Socinianism." 

1  The  Pauline  doctrine  has  been  summed  up  in  words  that  render  com- 
ment superfluous:  "God  created  man  in  simplicity  and  ignorance,  placed 
at  his  disposal  the  means  of  his  Fall,  left  him  defenseless  against  the  wiles 
of  Satan,  condemned  the  innocent  by  cursing  posterity,  denied  forgiveness 
to  the  penitent  unless  appeased  by  blood,  consecrated  the  heathen  rite  of 
human  sacrifice  by  the  crucifixion  of  His  only  Son,  limited  the  boon  of  ex- 
piation to  a  chosen  few,  and,  finally,  effaced  all  that  is  noblest  in  humanity 
by  teaching  men  to  seek  His  favor,  not  by  righteousness,  but  through  the 
vicarious  sufferings  of  an  innocent  man  judicially  murdered  to  satisfy 
divine  justice."  The  Evolution  of  Christianity,  396. 

3  "Sin  with  its  burden  lies  far  away  from  the  disciples  of  Jesus,  and  still 
farther  the  theology  of  sin  and  propitiation.  How  miserably  all  those 
fine-spun  theories  of  sacrifice  and  vicarious  atonement  crumble  to  pieces 
before  his  faith  in  the  love  of  God  our  Father  who  so  gladly  pardons. 


136  Paulinism 

Or  consider  Jesus'  view  of  human  life.  He  was  not  blind 
to  evil,  but  he  believed  it  could  be  eliminated  from  the 
soul  by  arduous  struggle.  If  there  were  sin  and  sorrow 
in  the  world,  so  also  there  were  happiness  and  goodness. 
These  were  the  positive  realities,  and  all  that  was  negative, 
that  was  not  of  the  good  and  loving  God,  was  temporal, 
provisional,  and  sooner  or  later  would  pass  away.  Com- 
pare the  Pauline  view :  the  heavy  cloud  of  sin  that  over- 
shadows the  earth;  the  nightmare  horror  of  the  vain 
struggle  with  the  flesh;  the  inevitable  doom  of  the  evil 
world  incapable  of  regeneration;  the  universal  reign  of 
death  and  the  race  going  down  to  destruction.  It  all 
seems  the  product  of  a  diseased  imagination.  But  if 
these  frightful  evils  of  man's  natural  condition  are  only 
imaginary,  there  is  no  need  to  imagine  a  supernatural 
remedy.  In  the  light  of  the  Gospel  these  morbid  terrors 
of  sin  and  death  are  scattered  like  morning  mist.  The 
fear  of  perishing  forever  like  the  brute  unless  miraculously 
saved  vanishes  before  the  sublime  intuition  of  Jesus :  ' '  He 
is  not  a  God  of  the  dead,  but  of  the  living";  and  we  feel 
that  His  very  being  certifies  our  immortality,  that  a  God 
who  could  let  us  die  would  not  be  God.  The  pessimistic 
contemplation  of  the  world  gives  way  to  that  confident, 
exultant  faith  in  the  future  of  mankind  for  which  Jesus 
stands  pre-eminent  among  the  sons  of  hope.  And  when 
we  listen  to  his  voice  revealing  the  fatherly  heart  of  the 
forgiving  God,  the  vision  of  sin  as  a  vast,  all-ruling  power 

The  one  parable  of  the  Prodigal  Son  wipes  them  all  off  the  slate."  Wernle, 
op.  tit.,  109. 

"For  Jesus  man's  ideal  of  righteousness  is  God;  for  Paul  the  glorified 
Christ.  Jesus  accepts  man's  righteousness,  purified  by  spirituality;  Paul 
rejects  human  righteousness  as  necessarily  impure  and  substitutes  the  per- 
fect righteousness  of  the  Christ  imputed  on  condition  of  faith.  Jesus 
thinks  of  an  inward  transformation  wrought  by  the  communion  of  man's 
will  with  God's;  Paul  demands  a  new  creation  of  humanity."  Toy, 
Christianity  and  Judaism,  281. 


Paulinism  137 

enthroned  above  a  prostrate  humanity  is  but  an  evil 
dream,  gone  when  one  awaketh.1  Jesus  looked  on  the 
creation  and  saw  that  it  was  good.  The  smile  on  the  face 
of  Nature  seemed  its  acknowledgment  of  the  good  God 
whose  mercy  is  over  all  His  works,  who  clothes  the  flowers 
with  beauty  and  feeds  the  birds  of  the  air  and  watches 
over  the  fallen  sparrow.  To  Paul  the  whole  creation  is 
groaning  and  travailing  in  pain.  To  him  the  lilies  of  the 
field  bear  no  message  of  the  Divine,  and  if  it  was  written 
in  God's  Law,  "Thou  shalt  not  muzzle  the  ox  that  treadeth 
out  the  corn, "  the  meaning  of  that  figure  is  that  Christian 
missionaries  have  a  claim  to  be  supported  by  the  churches; 
for,  "Doth  God  take  care  for  oxen?"  Children  speak  to 
the  heart  of  Jesus;  Paul  does  not  seem  aware  of  their 
existence;  and  the  loving  Father  whose  will  it  is  that  not 
one  of  His  little  ones  shall  perish  we  cannot  recognise  in 
the  divine  despot  who  determinates  the  destiny  of  his 
creatures  by  the  caprice  of  one  who  has  the  potter's  power 
over  the  clay. 

Paul  would  construct  a  Christian  theology  to  supplant 
the  Jewish,  and  meeting  the  ideas  of  Judaism  on  its  own 
ground,  with  weapons  taken  from  its  own  armory,  he  used 
all  a  lawyer's  subtlety  in  devising  an  intricate  scheme 
which  should  relieve  the  divine  custodian  of  the  Law  from 
the  technical  difficulties  in  which  he  was  involved.  Jesus 
ignores  the  old  artificial  barriers  which  had  been  built  up 
between  God  and  man,  wastes  no  time  in  labored  efforts 
to  surmount  obstacles  that  do  not  exist,  but  strikes  down 
at  once  to  the  real,  deep,  and  simple  principles  which  are 

1  "The  change  from  the  midnight  gloom  of  Israel's  pessimism  to  the 
cloudless  sunshine  of  Jesus'  optimistic  faith  is  perhaps  the  greatest  revolu- 
tion in  human  thought  that  a  single  mind  has  ever  achieved.  Or  if  there  is 
a  greater,  it  is  the  revolution  of  which  this  was  at  once  a  vital  aspect  and  a 
necessary  result, — the  restoration  by  the  same  master-mind  of  the  Divine 
Presence  to  the  heart  of  nature  and  to  the  soul  of  man."  The  Creed  of 
Christ,  113. 


138  Paulinism 

the  roots  of  the  religious  life.  He  tells  us  that  man 
is  by  nature  the  child  of  God,  and  in  this  filial  relation, 
which  is  primordial,  unconditioned  by  moral  criteria,  he 
has  his  being.  This  central  truth  of  the  Gospel  Paul 
failed  to  apprehend  and  his  theology  is  based  upon  this 
failure.  In  his  view  man's  sonship  is  not  a  natural,  but 
an  artificial  relation;  it  is  not  immanent  and  aboriginal, 
but  dependent  upon  the  scheme  of  atonement.  Far 
from  its  being  universal  and  unconditional,  men  are 
by  nature  children  of  wrath  and  it  is  only  by  divine  grace 
that  some  receive  the  "adoption"  of  sons — as  in  the 
Roman  law  of  adoption  one  who  was  not  a  member  of  the 
family  became  such  by  the  act  of  the  paterfamilias. 
"Adoption  is  a  distinctively  characteristic  idea  of  Paulin- 
ism and  sums  up  all  that  distinguishes  it  from  the  teaching 
of  Jesus"  (A.  Reville).  God  is  not  our  Father  from  all 
eternity,  but  in  the  fulness  of  time  He  assumed  the 
position  of  Father  to  a  portion  of  mankind — His  elect 
who  are  justified  through  faith  in  redemption  by  the  blood 
of  Christ.  "Father  is  not  the  primitive  cry  of  humanity 
which  all  men  may  utter;  it  is  a  title  which  Christ  has 
gained  permission  for  the  elect  to  use"  (Weiss). 

At  every  point  the  contrast  declares  itself  between 
Jesus  and  his  so-called  expositor.  Jesus  insists  upon 
moral  reformation  as  a  man's  own  work;  with  Paul 
liberation  from  sin  is  an  act  of  God's  grace,  and  his  de- 
mand is  that  men  shall  believe  in  a  series  of  divine  acts. 
Jesus  aims  at  personal  character  and  the  heart  of  his 
preaching  is  its  moral  appeal :  Ye  cannot  serve  God  and 
Mammon;  no  man  who  has  put  his  hand  to  the  plow 
and  looks  back  is  fit  for  the  Kingdom  of  God;  if  thine  eye 
tempt  thee  to  offend,  pluck  it  out  and  cast  it  from  thee. 
For  Paul  such  injunctions  are  superfluous,  since  Christ 
has  been  delivered  up  for  our  offenses  and  raised  for  our 
justification.  Jesus  calls  on  men  to  live  up  to  the  truth 


Paulinism  139 

of  a  nature  one  in  kind  with  the  nature  of  their  Father: 
Be  ye  perfect  as  your  heavenly  Father  is  perfect.  Paul 
writes :  Christ  is  made  unto  us  righteousness  and  sanctifi- 
cation.  Jesus  urges  men  to  a  "metanoia, "  a  life-giving 
change  of  the  inner  man,  not  as  sinners  but  as  needing 
whether  sinners  or  not  to  change  in  themselves,  in  their 
inmost  soul,  through  consciousness  of  their  sonship  to 
God.  He  assumes  the  will-power,  the  spiritual  energy, 
to  make  the  change.  That  is  his  starting-point.  Go 
down  into  what  you  are,  he  says ;  it  is  not  outward  obedi- 
ence to  the  right  that  counts,  but  the  man  himself.  Paul 
transforms  this  insufficiency  of  mere  obedience  into 
man's  inability  to  obey.  Your  righteousness,  said  Jesus, 
must  exceed  the  righteousness  of  the  Pharisees.  Paul  said : 
the  Pharisaic  righteousness  exceeds  our  powers.  We  are 
impotent,  helpless,  sold  as  slaves  to  sin;  man  is  unchange- 
able and  the  metanoia  is  impossible.  And  that  is  his 
starting-point  of  a  supernatural  scheme  for  man's  salva- 
tion at  the  hands  of  another.  We  read  that  Jesus  said: 
"My  words  shall  not  pass  away, "  but  the  greatest  of  the 
Christian  missionaries  seems  not  to  know  that  he  had  ever 
spoken.  He  called  himself  an  Apostle  of  Jesus  Christ, 
but  the  Being  whose  Apostle  he  professed  to  be  was  not 
the  real  Jesus  of  history. 

And  what  of  him?  The  Man  who  lived  on  earth, 
whose  life  and  work  it  is  our  conviction  are  the  most 
momentous  facts  in  human  history,  Paul  displaces  by  a 
dead  and  risen  Messiah,  the  creation  of  Jewish  fantasy 
remodeled  to  meet  the  requirements  of  a  plan  of  salvation 
apart  from  the  works  of  the  Law.  While  popular  expecta- 
tion saw  in  the  Messiah  the  Lion  of  the  tribe  of  Judah  who 
should  break  the  heathen  in  pieces  like  a  potter's  vessel, 
Paul  identified  him  with  the  Philonic  heavenly  Man  who 
existed  "in  the  form  of  God"  before  the  creation  of  the 
world,  and  thus  the  speculations  of  the  Alexandrine 


140  Paulinism 

eclectic  became  fundamental  tenets  of  the  Christian  faith. 
If  nothing  more  than  Paul's  writings  had  come  down  to  us 
from  the  first  Christians  we  should  never  have  learned 
that  such  a  man  as  Jesus  had  really  lived.  That  intensely 
impressive  personality  is  taken  out  of  the  conditions  of 
humanity  and,  as  in  a  dissolving  view,  melts  into  the 
shadowy  figure  of  a  celestial  spirit-being  who  descends  to 
earth  in  the  likeness  of  men  that  he  may  die  and  by  his 
rising  from  the  dead  become  the  head  of  a  new  world- 
order  of  supernatural  life  for  as  many  as  shall  believe  in 
him.  Such  a  Christian  Saviour  might  be  readily  accepted 
by  the  pagan  world  as  a  divine  being  emanating  from  the 
"abundance  of  deity,"  and  hence  the  first  step  toward 
those  Docetic  teachings  of  the  Gnostics  which  a  century 
later  threatened  to  dissolve  the  Christian  religion  into  a 
mythical  dream-picture  was  taken  by  the  Apostle  Paul. 
Let  us  turn  back  to  Jesus.  In  the  synoptic  story  he 
does  not  make  himself  the  centre  of  his  Gospel;  it  is  not 
his  person  but  his  message  that  he  presses  on  men's 
acceptance:  He  that  heareth  these  sayings  of  mine 
and  doeth  them  is  like  a  man  that  builds  upon  the  rock. 
.  .  .  Not  everyone  that  saith  unto  me.  Lord,  Lord,  shall 
enter  into  the  Kingdom,  but  he  that  doeth  the  will  of  the 
Father.1  This  man  of  God  arrogates  no  exceptional 
superiority  in  dignity  or  sanctity,  but  ranks  himself  with 
the  run  of  his  fellow-men:  Why  callest  thou  me  good? 
None  is  good  save  one,  even  God.  Jesus  strove  to  bring 
men  to  the  Father,  but  that  they  could  only  come  through 
him — that  some  personal  relation  to  himself  was  the 
necessary  condition  of  entrance  into  true  relations  with 
God — he  never  dreamed.  Paul  the  Jew  did  not  believe 

1  "Son  ceuvre  e"tait  1'essentiel;  sa  personne  s'effaca  devant  elle.  Les 
conditions  d'entre"e  dans  le  royaume  de  Dieu  ne  font  pas  mention  de  la  foi 
en  lui;  le  paulinisme  est  encore  loin."  A.  Re*ville,  Jesus  de  Nazareth,  ii, 
198. 


Paulinism  141 

in  a  free  approach  to  God,  and  his  Christology  was  elab- 
orated to  bridge  the  gulf  between  human  and  divine 
which  to  Jesus  was  non-existent.  Jesus  tells  us  that  the 
soul  stands  face  to  face  with  God:  Paul  interposes  a 
third  party  to  "reconcile"  Father  and  child.1  Christ  the 
Mediator  at  the  right  hand  of  God,  making  intercession  for 
us  (Rom.  viii,  34),  is  a  wholly  Pauline  creation.  It  was 
impossible  for  Jesus  to  admit  the  necessity  of  any  media- 
tion, for  their  immediate  communion  with  the  heavenly 
Father  was  precisely  his  message  to  mankind.  Yet 
Paul  rather  than  Jesus  has  been  the  teacher  of  Christen- 
dom, and  our  petitions  are  still  sent  "through  Jesus  Christ 
our  Lord, "  although  in  the  prayer  he  taught  his  disciples 
there  is  no  word  of  his  advocacy,  nor  any  mention  of 
his  name.  The  Logos  of  the  fourth  gospel  is  truer  to 
Jesus  than  the  Pauline  Christ  when  he  tells  the  believers: 
"I  say  not  that  I  will  pray  the  Father  for  you,  for  the 
Father  Himself  loveth  you."  The  God  of  Jesus  and 
of  his  preaching  is  this  heavenly  Father.  In  Paulinism 
He  receives  acknowledgment,  but  the  real  God  of  Paul 
and  of  the  Christian  religion,  is  the  Christ.  Paul's  com- 
munion with  the  Divine  was  his  life  "in  Christ,"  and  the 
religious  "experience"  of  Christians  has  been  that  of 
Paul. 

1  "The  Pauline  doctrine  teaches  that  communion  with  God  is  afforded 
by  the  continual  mediation  of  a  Being  in  whom  are  united  the  antique 
conception  of  a  Son  of  God,  the  Hellenic  conception  of  a  nature  half  divine, 
half  human,  and  the  Jewish  conception  of  the  Messiah."  Meyer,  op.  tit., 

120. 

The  notion  of  a  mediator,  whether  the  Pauline  Christ,  the  Logos  of 
Philo,  or  the  World-Soul  of  Plotinus,  is  in  itself  a  futile  one.  If  you  face, 
or  fancy  that  you  face,  a  dualism  of  exclusive  opposites,  you  cannot  escape 
from  it  by  the  device  of  an  intermediary.  For  such  intermediary,  as 
sharing  the  nature  of  the  contradictory  elements,  will  contain  them  both; 
that  is,  the  dualism  will  reappear  within  it.  A  dualism  is  only  resolved 
in  a  unity  which  embraces  both  the  opposites  as  constituents  of  its  own 
essential  difference — correlatives  that  merge  in  self -relation. 


142  Paulinism 

With  the  doctrine  of  ''redemption"  substituted  for  the 
teachings  of  Jesus,  with  the  "perverse  proceeding" 
(Harnack)  that  made  the  Gospel  into  a  Christology,  all 
came  to  depend  upon  a  correct  understanding  of  the  person 
and  work  of  the  Christ;  and  the  "gospel"  of  Paul  led  way 
to  the  eclipse  of  religion  in  the  violence  of  later  theological 
controversy.  In  that  gospel  "faith"  silently  changes  to 
the  faith,  a  creed ;  hence  it  becomes  a  barrier  of  separation 
between  men,  and  outside  the  Church,  the  community 
of  believers  in  the  Word  of  the  Cross,  there  is  no  salvation. 
We  find  Jesus  silent  as  to  matters  metaphysical,  but  these 
are  the  Apostle's  chosen  field,  and  he  knows  all  about  the 
divine  eternal  purposes,  as  if  God  were  "a  man  in  the 
next  street."  The  dogma  of  the  Atonement,  the  starting- 
point  of  the  whole  system,  is  nothing  else  than  an  un- 
verifiable  speculation,  or  hypothesis,  in  regard  to  the 
assumed  purpose  of  Christ's  death,  but  it  is  given  out  as 
a  divine  oracle.  The  founder  of  Christian  theology  is  the 
first  to  exhibit  that  amazing  self-confidence  in  his  ability 
to  elucidate  all  mysteries  in  heaven  above  and  earth 
beneath  which  ever  since  has  been  the  distinguishing 
mark  of  the  theologian.  It  was  the  not  unreasonable 
complaint  of  a  later  day  that  in  the  Apostle's  Letters  were 
"some  things  hard  to  be  understood, "  but  while  theology 
may  be  a  more  or  less  difficult  study  for  the  wise  and  pru- 
dent, we  have  the  word  of  Jesus — "our  Saviour  from  the 
theologians" — that  the  open  secrets  of  religion,  of  life, 
are  hidden  from  them  to  be  revealed  to  babes.  The 
Gospel  shows  the  open  way  to  God  our  Father.  Man  is 
organised  for  direct  intercourse  with  God,  and  a  man 
without  the  natural  capacity  for  this  would  be  less  than 
human.  Jesus  found  it  an  unused  power,  and  dying  out 
for  want  of  use,  and  his  word  called  it  into  exercise,  called 
men  to  that  life  of  conscious  union  with  God  in  heart  and 
will  which  is  the  one  need  of  the  soul.  Here  is  truth 


Paulinism  143 

infinitely  deep  and  exquisitely  simple:  the  ultimate  truth 
of  all  theology  and  anthropology,  yet  verifiable  in  the 
experience  of  a  child.  It  is  always  so  with  the  sayings  of 
Jesus.  Deep  as  the  unsounded  seas,  they  are  always 
simple,  sane,  reasonable,  self-evident ;  and  always  they 
carry  with  them  something  free  and  buoyant,  something 
of  the  open  air  that  reminds  us  how  birds  and  flowers 
were  his  delight.  How  far  away  from  them  we  travel 
when  we  go  from  the  gospels  to  the  epistles,  to  the  tortuous 
mazes  of  the  Pauline  speculation  and  the  strained  and 
anxious  workings  of  the  writer's  mind!  When  ye  pray 
use  not  vain  repetitions  as  the  heathen  do,  for  your 
Father  knoweth  what  things  ye  have  need  of  before  ye 
ask  Him.  What  man  is  there  of  you  who  if  his  son  ask 
bread  will  give  him  a  stone?  All  things  whatsoever  ye 
would  that  men  should  do  to  you,  do  ye  even  so  to  them. 
When  ye  stand  praying,  forgive,  if  ye  have  aught  against 
any,  and  your  Father  in  heaven  will  also  forgive  you. 
Whosoever  shall  humble  himself  as  this  little  child,  the 
same  is  greatest  in  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  This  is  a 
teaching  that  needs  no  learned  commentators  to  expound 
— with  much  disagreement  among  themselves. 

It  would  be  easy  to  enlarge  indefinitely  upon  the 
" gross  and  palpable"  difference  between  the  teaching  of 
Paul  and  that  of  Jesus,  but  if  it  were  merely  a  question  of 
their  difference,  as  of  that  between  the  Pauline  and 
Judeo-Christian  theologies,  it  would  not  be  a  matter  of 
importance.  The  important  point  is  the  disastrous  effect 
of  the  one  upon  the  other.  The  important  point  is  the 
metamorphosis  which  the  Gospel  has  undergone  at  the 
hands  of  the  Apostle,  or  rather  the  substitution  of  a  hetero- 
soteric  supernaturalism  for  the  religion  of  free  will  and 
personal  life. 

The  second  founder  of  Christianity  has,  compared  with  the 


144  Paulinism 

first,  exercised  beyond  all  doubt  the  stronger — not  the  better 
— influence.  He  has  thrust  the  greater  person  whom  he  meant 
to  serve  into  the  background.  Tertullian,  Origen,  Athanasius, 
Augustine,  Anselm,  Luther,  Calvin — not  one  of  these  great 
teachers  can  be  understood  on  the  ground  of  the  preaching 
and  the  historic  personality  of  Jesus;  the  key  to  their  com- 
prehension, with  sundry  links  between,  is  Paul.1 

And  so  the  contrast  brought  before  us  is  one  to  which  we 
should  direct  our  serious  thought,  for  it  speaks  to  us,  if  we 
will  hear  it,  in  the  words  of  Israel's  leader:  " Choose 
ye  this  day  whom  ye  will  serve."  And  choose  indeed  we 
must :  unless  the  Kingdom  of  the  truth  can  stand  divided 
against  itself  we  cannot  be  disciples  at  once  of  Paul  the 
theologian  and  of  Jesus  the  Son  of  Man. 

1  Wrede,  Paul,  180. 


IV 
Catholicism 

i.     The  Perpetuation  of  Judaism 

T^HERE  can  scarcely  be  a  more  interesting  field  of 
1  study  than  is  offered  by  the  ages  of  transition 
from  the  world  of  imperial  Rome  to  the  confines  of  the 
medieval  world,  when  the  institutions  and  traditions  of 
classical  antiquity  were  declining  and  passing  away,  when 
the  ideas,  standards,  and  sentiments  of  men,  their  habit  of 
mind,  their  mental  outlook,  their  type  of  character  were 
slowly  undergoing  a  complete  transformation.  It  was 
during  these  ages  that  the  rise  and  growth  of  the  Catholic 
Church  took  place,  itself  a  potent  factor  in  the  changes  of 
the  time,  by  which  in  turn  it  was  profoundly  influenced. 
Yet  of  all  the  far-reaching  changes  in  human  thought  and 
life  none  is  more  complete  than  that  earlier  one  within 
the  Church  itself,  the  transformation  of  primitive  Chris- 
tianity, which  in  the  main  was  effected  during  the  second 
century.  If  the  devoted  Aristarchus  could  have  re- 
visited the  Church  of  Rome  a  century  or  more  after  his 
master's  martyrdom  he  would  have  found  nothing  but  its 
name  familiar  to  him,  and  might  well  have  wondered 
how  the  simple  little  community  to  which  the  Apostle 
addressed  his  famous  Letter  could  have  grown  into  this 
imposing  structure  of  ecclesiastical  organisation. 

10  I45 


146  Catholicism 

A  familiar  argument  in  behalf  of  the  legitimacy  of 
Catholicism  is  based  on  the  doctrine  of  development. 
If  this  term  be  taken  as  equivalent  to  evolution,  a  process 
said  to  account  for  the  origin  of  species — that  is,  one  lead- 
ing to  the  production  of  new  and  diverse  organic  forms — 
no  doubt  Christian  history  may  be  regarded  as  such  a 
development.  But  if  we  are  to  understand  a  biological 
development,  simply  a  process  of  expansion,  of  enlarging 
and  filling  out  a  miniature  organism — and  that  is  what 
Newman  had  in  mind — then  the  analogy  seems  question- 
able. It  must  indeed  be  said  of  anything  that  has  life 
and  a  history  that  its  whole  content  is  not  realised  in  its 
primitive  condition,  but  in  its  developed  maturity.  Jesus 
declared  that  his  word  was  as  seed  sown  in  the  field  of  the 
world.  It  was  to  grow  by  assimilating  to  itself  such 
elements  as  it  found  there,  and  it  was  subject  to  the 
changes  and  modifications  incident  to  growth.  We  may 
freely  admit  this  view  of  the  Gospel  as  a  germ  to  be  un- 
folded in  the  life  of  the  Church,  but  we  have  always  this 
test  of  a  true  development.  Whatever  changes  time 
effects,  throughout  them  all  an  organic  being  remains 
itself;  no  variation  can  evolve  to  alter  its  identity  or  break 
the  continuity  of  its  existence.  And  furthermore,  a  true 
development  is  that  which  fulfils  the  end,  or  latent  pur- 
pose, of  the  organism;  it  must  follow  a  course  that  leads 
to  and  discloses  the  fulfilment  of  the  purpose  of  the  life 
of  the  organism.  The  question  is,  do  we  find  this  con- 
tinuity of  sameness  between  the  teachings  of  Jesus  and  the 
later  religion  given  to  men  in  his  name,  and  do  we  find 
in  the  Christian  religion  a  fulfilment  of  the  end  and  aim  of 
those  teachings ;  or  has  the  growth  of  that  religion  been 
largely  shaped  by  foreign  influences,  has  it  taken  into 
itself  many  discordant  elements  from  the  old  religions, 
and  far  from  assimilating  them,  surrendered  to  their 
dominance,  and  has  it  followed  aberrant  lines  of  develop- 


Catholicism  147 

ment  which  have  brought  it  at  essential  points  to  a 
contradiction  of  the  Gospel  in  its  spirit  and  principles? 

To  begin  with,  there  ought  to  be  nothing  plainer  to  the 
Bible  student  than  the  radical  opposition  of  the  Gospel 
of  Jesus  to  the  religious  system  of  the  Jews;  and  if  this 
passed  unobserved  by  the  simple  villagers  of  Galilee, 
held  by  the  charm  of  his  discourse  about  the  loving  God 
and  the  goodness  He  asked  for  in  His  children,  Pharisees 
and  Sadducees  were  quick  to  perceive  the  dangerous 
attack  upon  their  cherished  principles,  and  they  made 
no  mistake  when  they  took  strong  measures  to  suppress  the 
pernicious  activities  of  the  Prophet.  It  follows  that  in  so 
far  as  the  Christian  religion  was  a  perpetuation  of  Judaism 
it  failed  to  be  a  development  of  the  religion  of  Jesus.  We 
must  understand  that  the  first  disciples  were  Jews,  not 
Christians  of  the  type  of  a  later  day.  They  had  added  to 
their  Judaism  a  belief  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah,  and 
this  belief  bound  them  together  by  a  special  tie  and 
inspired  a  warm  sentiment  of  brotherhood  which  sought 
expression  in  their  meetings  for  prayer  and  the  Apostles' 
teaching,  in  their  common  meals  where  the  Lord's  death 
was  commemorated  in  the  breaking  of  bread,  and  in 
sharing  with  the  poor  their  worldly  goods — a  communistic 
experiment  which  time  was  soon  to  condemn.  All  this 
was  wholly  consonant  with  loyalty  to  their  religion,  and 
there  was  no  thought  of  a  separatist  movement.  "They 
desired  to  be  nothing  more  than  the  Messiah-believing 
nucleus  of  the  Jewish  people."1  They  felt  no  need  of 
forsaking  Moses  in  order  to  follow  their  Master,  since  for 
them  the  Gospel  of  the  Kingdom  was  not  a  new  revelation 
but  the  fulfilment  of  the  Law  and  the  Prophets.  Their 
only  point  of  difference  from  other  Jews  touched  a  ques- 
tion of  fact,  not  of  principle,  and  the  mere  reference  ot  the 
messianic  hope  to  Jesus  did  nothing  to  take  them  outside 

1  Pfleiderer,  Christian  Origins,  146. 


148  Catholicism 

the  bounds  of  Judaism.1  Indeed  their  more  definite 
expectation  of  the  Messiah's  speedy  coming  inspired  a 
surpassing  zeal  in  the  works  of  the  Law.  Regular  in 
attendance  at  the  Temple,  strict  in  observance  of  the 
Sabbath,  scrupulous  in  regard  to  all  legal  prescriptions, 
the  exemplary  piety  of  these  new  sectaries  gained  them 
the  favor  of  the  Pharisees  and  the  esteem  of  all  Jews.2 
Such  an  attitude  on  the  part  of  Jesus'  own  followers 
seems  strange  to  us,  but  we  must  bear  in  mind  that  the 
time  allowed  for  their  education  in  the  Gospel  was  very 
short.  To  comprehend  its  principles  in  all  their  far- 
reaching  issues,  to  see  how  its  revelation  acted  as  a  solvent 
on  the  old  beliefs  of  the  world  and  made  all  things  new, 
necessitated  such  a  change  in  the  whole  mental  view  of 
these  votaries  of  a  divinely  given  national  religion  as 
could  not  be  wrought  in  the  space  of  a  single  year. 3  Nor 
was  Jesus'  method  with  them  such  as  to  hasten  the  change. 
He  did  not  come  to  destroy,  to  make  a  violent  break  with 

1  In  the  view  of  the  Clementines,  "the  Jews  erred  respecting  the  Lord's 
first  coming,  and  this  is  really  the  only  difference  between  us  and  them. 
For  that  a  Messiah  is  to  come  they  believe  as  well  as  we;  the  only  point  of 
disagreement  is  as  to  his  having  already  appeared  in  humble  guise." 

2  "If  we  wish  to  appreciate  justly  the  earliest  church  which  gathered  in 
Jerusalem  round  the  Twelve,  we  must  think  of  all  its  members  as  pious 
Jews.     The  certainty  that  the  Messiah  had  appeared  in  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
only  impelled  them  to  redouble  their  pious  zeal  and  to  strive  after  the 
realisation  of  the  Jewish  ideal  of  piety."     Dobschutz,  Christian  Life  in  the 
Primitive  Church,  141. 

3  Whether  the  ministry  of  Jesus  was,  as  Keim  argues,  of  one  year's 
duration  or  of  a  somewhat  longer  period  is  not  a  question  of  great  impor- 
tance.    It  would  seem  that  events  moved  swiftly,  and  above  all  we  cannot 
suppose  that  the  Pharisees  and  rulers  would  tolerate  for  any  length  of  time 
a  preaching  at  many  points  directly  and  always  indirectly  subversive  of 
the  Law.     They  would  make  short  work  of  it  as  they  had  of  John's;  for 
there  can  be  little  doubt  that  it  was  at  their  instigation  Antipas  ordered  the 
arrest  of  the  Baptist  after  he  had  withdrawn  from  their  jurisdiction  to 
Perea.     We  have  words  of  Jesus  that  plainly  intimate  as  much  (Matt, 
xvii,  10-12).     The  story  of  Herodias  and  Salome  is  not  in  accord  with 
historical  facts. 


Catholicism  149 

the  past.  As  certain  trees  are  never  naked  because  the 
old  leaves  do  not  fall  until  the  new  buds  are  ready  to 
open,  so  he  would  leave  undisturbed  the  cherished  convic- 
tions of  ancient  piety  until  they  should  fall  of  themselves 
before  the  unfolding  of  the  Gospel  principles.  His  way 
of  changing  men's  ideas  and  beliefs  was  first  to  change  the 
men  themselves,  leaving  all  else  to  follow.  As  he  passed 
day  by  day  from  one  group  of  hearers  to  another  his  living 
word  fell  lightly  on  the  old  soil  of  Judaism,  and  it  was  left 
to  its  germination  to  break  through  the  deposit  of  the 
tradition  of  the  centuries.  As  to  a  deeper  meaning  or  a 
wider  scope  than  was  explicit  in  his  sayings,  he  left  that 
to  the  reflection  of  the  intelligent  with  the  admonition: 
"He  that  hath  ears  to  hear,  let  him  hear."  But  of  in- 
telligence there  was  a  woeful  lack  among  his  followers. 
It  is  plain  from  the  gospel  story  that  during  their  whole 
companionship  there  was  no  trace  of  intellectual  sympathy 
between  Jesus  and  the  dull-minded  villagers  he  made 
his  friends.  Under  the  spell  of  his  magnetic  personality 
they  clung  to  him  with  dog-like  devotion,  but  their 
inveterate  materialism  blocked  the  access  of  spiritual 
truth,  and  their  dense  literalness  found  even  his  simple 
metaphors  beyond  their  comprehension.  Time  and  again 
his  words  went  over  their  heads,  and  his  thought  was  a 
sealed  book  to  them.  If  the  Apostle  Paul  had  been  of  the 
Twelve  there  might  have  been  one  to  preach  the  Gospel 
of  Jesus  in  the  wide  range  of  its  whole  truth  and  free 
from  complication  with  rabbinical  theology.  It  must 
be  deemed  great  loss  to  him  and  to  the  world  that  he  did 
not  know  Jesus  after  the  flesh  instead  of  "seeing"  him 
in  visions.  However  we  seek  to  explain  it  the  fact  re- 
mains that  if  the  disciples  had  imbibed  something  of  his 
spirit,  they  had  not  entered  into  the  mind  of  the  Master 
nor  grasped  the  revolutionary  implications  of  his  teaching. 
They  could  not  see  that  his  conflict  with  Scribes  and  Phari- 


150  Catholicism 

sees  was  a  conflict  with  the  religious  system  they  stood 
for,  and  it  was  left  to  the  alarmed  suspicions  of  his  enemies 
to  take  the  meaning  of  his  saying:  "I  will  destroy  this 
temple  made  with  hands  and  in  three  days  build  another 
made  without  hands ' ' : 

As  they  themselves  had  gradually  and  without  any  decisive 
breach  with  their  Jewish  way  of  thought  come  to  believe  in 
Jesus  as  the  Messiah,  so  it  appeared  to  them  that  in  the  fu- 
ture the  belief  in  Christ  would  be  perfectly  compatible  with 
Judaism.  The  idea  that  they  could  come  to  be  mutually 
exclusive  opposites  had  not  entered  their  minds.1 

We  cannot  fail  to  see  that  if  the  religion  of  Jesus  had 
been  left  in  the  hands  of  the  Jerusalem  community  under 
"James,  Cephas,  and  John"  it  would  have  perished  from 
the  earth  in  the  downfall  of  the  Jewish  state.  It  was 
from  outside  their  circle,  and  against  their  will  that  the 
movement  started  which  was  to  transform  the  faith  of 
an  obscure  Jewish  sect  into  the  religion  of  the  Greco- 
Roman  world. 

The  Greek  speaking  Jews  of  foreign  birth,  settled  in 
every  quarter  of  the  Empire,  could  not  remain  unaffected 
by  their  surroundings.  In  populous  cities  where  met  and 
mingled  beliefs,  sentiments,  and  usages  the  most  diverse, 
where  local  narrowness  and  prejudice  dissolved  in  the 
heat  of  fusion  and  assimilation,  they  tended  to  become 
more  accessible  to  new  ideas  and  habituated  to  freer  and 
broader  views  than  were  congenial  with  the  mental  habit 
of  Palestine.  Racial  arrogance  and  loathing  of  the 
Gentile  had  its  root  in  the  national  soil  and  did  not  flourish 
as  an  exotic.  In  the  Holy  Land  foreign  intruders  might 
be  banned  as  "sinners,"  but  abroad  relations  were  re- 
versed ;  the  Jew  saw  that  he  was  the  foreigner,  and,  rather 
having  need  to  ask  for  tolerance  than  power  to  withhold 

1  Pfleiderer,  Primitive  Christianity,  i,  34. 


Catholicism  151 

it,  might  well  be  satisfied  that  in  the  Greek  cities  there 
was  room  for  all  and  the  protection  of  equal  laws.  Here  in 
contact  with  an  advanced  civilization,  in  more  or  less 
close  relations  with  men  of  every  class  and  condition,  and 
with  his  native  adaptability  to  all  environments,  the 
Hellenist  was,  but  for  his  religion,  in  the  way  of  becoming 
a  thorough  cosmopolitan.  And  even  his  religion  could  not 
altogether  escape  the  influences  that  were  acting  upon  his 
thought  and  life.  He  remained  indeed  firmly  attached 
to  his  ancestral  faith,  but  in  his  remoteness  from  the 
centre  of  the  levitical  worship  he  was  free  from  its  deaden- 
ing formalism,  and  the  prayers  and  scripture  expositions 
of  the  Synagogue  offered  him  a  more  reasonable  service 
than  the  spectacular  rites  of  the  Temple.  Converts 
from  Paganism  formed  an  important  element  in  the 
communities  of  the  Dispersion,  and  these  Proselytes  were 
at  once  a  link  between  Jews  and  Gentiles  and  in  some 
sort  a  witness  to  the  religion  of  faith  and  inward  life; 
for  they  bore  the  distinctive  name  of  " devout"  men,  or 
"worshippers"  of  Jehovah,  and  yet  were  not  submitted  to 
the  rule  of  the  ritual  law.  Again,  the  influence  of  Greek 
thought  and  culture  insensibly  modified  the  religious 
conceptions  of  the  Hellenists.  In  Alexandria  the  attempt 
was  made  to  bring  the  doctrines  of  Judaism  into  harmony 
with  the  prevalent  philosophy.  A  method  of  allegorical 
exegesis  discovered  the  hidden  sense  of  Scripture,  and  an 
idealistic  interpretation  of  the  regulations  of  the  Law 
represented  them  as  symbols  of  esoteric  truth;  and  hence, 
just  as  modern  scientific  research  creates  a  new  mental 
atmosphere,  and  a  wider  view  of  the  world  finds  its  way 
to  the  man  in  the  street,  so  the  speculations  of  the  learned 
Hellenists  brought  to  men  who  knew  nothing  of  philosophy 
general  notions  of  religion  larger,  more  liberal,  and  more 
spiritual  than  ever  entered  the  minds  of  the  Rabbins  of 
Jerusalem.  For  their  part  the  Palestinian  Jews  looked 


152  Catholicism 

with  suspicion  and  dislike  upon  men  of  such  training  and 
temper.  Detesting  the  Greek  language,  despising  the 
Greek  Bible,  deeming  contact  with  the  Gentile  a  con- 
tamination and  longing  to  free  the  Holy  Land  from  his 
desecrating  intrusion,  they  were  far  from  sharing  the 
generous  hope  of  the  salvation  of  the  Gentile  world  through 
Mosaism.  The  latent  antagonism  which  everywhere 
divided  Greek  and  Hebrew  Jews  was  now  to  make  its 
appearance  within  the  community  of  believers  in  Jesus 
the  Christ,  and  with  the  accession  of  a  body  of  Hellenists 
its  placid  uniformity  was  troubled  by  a  new  and  disturbing 
element.  When  these  newcomers  began  to  give  thought 
to  the  words  and  deeds  of  Jesus,  and  deeper  reflection 
gathered  their  import  and  bearing,  the  fact  that  the  Gospel 
addressed  itself  to  men  as  men,  and  not  to  Jews  as  Jews 
— that  an  inward  and  personal  message  was  as  such  a 
message  to  humanity — could  not  but  reveal  itself  to  their 
more  open  and  active  minds,  and  hence  arose  a  dissension 
in  the  early  Church  which  grew  ever  more  pronounced 
and  bitter  as  time  went  on.  We  read  in  the  Acts  that  on 
complaint  by  the  Hellenists  of  unfairness  to  their  poor  in 
the  daily  distribution  of  supplies,  the  brethren  chose  seven 
men  of  good  repute  to  relieve  the  Apostles  of  the  charge 
of  this  charitable  work.1  As  regards  the  likelihood  of 
partiality,  the  assembly  seems  to  have  gone  to  the  opposite 
extreme,  for  the  almoners  selected  to  care  for  the  needs  of 
the  whole  community  are  all  Hellenists,  except  one  who 

1  This  proceeding  has  been  regarded  as  the  institution  of  the  Diaconate , 
but  the  Diaconate  in  the  later  specific  sense  of  the  term  makes  its  first 
appearance  in  connection  with  the  Episcopate,  and  was  never  an  independent 
office.  As  Deacons,  or  table-servers,  the  Seven  disappear  immediately 
after  their  entrance  upon  the  scene,  and  two  of  them  reappear  in  quite 
another  character;  and  when  after  their  flight  from  Jerusalem  the  Church 
loses  their  services,  it  does  not  replace  them  with  others  appointed  in  like 
manner,  as  would  certainly  be  its  action  if  they  represented  an  order  of 
the  ministry. 


Catholicism  153 

is  a  Greek  of  Antioch. x  Its  oon  appears  however  that  the 
grievance  of  the  Hellenistic  widows  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  real  course  of  events.  Our  author  promptly 
drops  the  fiction  of  their  appointment  to  serve  tables,  and 
represents  Stephen  and  Philip  as  devoting  themselves  to 
preaching  the  Gospel.  "Philip  the  Evangelist  one  of  the 
Seven"  (Acts  xxi,  8:  the  "  We  "  document)  has  the  same 
sound  as  Peter  the  Apostle  one  of  the  Twelve,  and  such 
titles  seem  to  designate  the  leaders  of  two  separate 
groups  within  the  community.  While  the  circumstances 
that  really  led  to  the  coming  forward  of  the  Seven  are 
lost  to  us,  it  was  clearly  the  result  of  religious  differences 
between  the  Hebrews  and  the  Hellenists,  and  the  convic- 
tions of  the  latter  led  them  to  an  effort  to  free  the  new 
religion  from  the  fetters  of  the  Law.  So  far  as  concerned 
Jerusalem  the  movement  was  instantly  crushed.  Stephen 
was  haled  before  the  Council  and  accused  of  blasphemy 
in  declaring  that  the  crucified  Messiah  would  come  again 
to  destroy  the  Temple  and  abolish  the  Mosaic  institu- 
tions. It  was  the  charge  that  had  been  brought  against 
Jesus,  and  from  this  it  may  be  gathered  that  the  bold 
Evangelist  had  gained  a  clear  intelligence  of  the  Master's 
saying  concerning  new  wine  and  old  skins.  His  defense, 
in  which  he  turned  accuser,  sealed  the  Martyr's  fate, 
but  his  work  was  done;  though  time  was  needed  to  make 
it  evident,  he  had  forced  Christianity  and  Judaism  to 
define  themselves  and  to  separate,  and  his  blood  was  the 
seed  of  the  Christian  Church.  It  was  none  of  the  Hebrew 
brethren,  but  certain  proselytes,  converts  of  his  preaching, 
who  carried  Stephen  to  his  burial  and  mourned  him,  and 
the  attack  that  opened  at  once  upon  the  Hellenists  who 
shared  his  dangerous  views  was  directed  against  them 
alone.  The  adherents  of  the  Twelve  were  left  unmolested, 

1  Nicolas,  whose  Gentile-Christian  converts  are  denounced  in  the  Apoca- 
lypse under  the  name  of  Nicolaitans  for  their  antinomianism. 


154  Catholicism 

for  they  had  done  nothing  to  incur  hostility,  or  if  they 
suffered  in  reputation  among  the  rigid  Jews,  they  might 
well  protest  that  they  were  unfairly  compromised  by 
associates  with  whom  they  had  no  sympathy.  Mean- 
while the  Hellenists  were  driven  forth  to  carry  the  new 
religion  beyond  the  bounds  of  Israel,  and  now  here,  now 
there,  in  the  neighboring  lands  Christian  communities 
sprang  into  life  that  opened  their  arms  to  everyone  who 
would  "believe  with  all  his  heart," — as  Philip  said  to 
the  Ethiopian — and  welcomed  him  without  other  terms 
or  conditions  into  the  fellowship  of  Christ. 

The  opposition  between  Jewish  and  Gentile  Christianity, 
though  strongly  marked,  did  not  at  once  declare  itself 
irreconcilable.  The  mission  to  the  Gentiles  had  come 
about  as  the  result  of  Jewish  persecution,  and  not  of  an 
open  break  within  the  company  of  believers ;  the  consider- 
able success  it  achieved  might  seem  to  attest  the  divine 
favor,  and  though  the  Jewish  Christians — or  Christian 
Jews,  as  a  modern  writer  perhaps  more  accurately  names 
them, x  found  it  hard  to  tolerate  the  heterodoxy  of  their 
fellow  Messianists,  for  a  time  Jerusalem  and  Antioch 
put  up  with  one  another  as  well  as  might  be,  like  opposite 
parties  in  our  Church  to-day.  Such  was  the  position  of 
affairs  when  one  appeared  among  the  Hellenists  who, 
like  Shakspeare  among  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  so 
towers  above  his  fellows  that  he  seems  to  efface  them  and 
to  stand  alone.  He  carried  to  the  West  the  spirit  of  the 
Hellenist  movement  in  all  its  breadth  and  freedom,  and 
his  gospel  was  a  definite  repudiation  of  the  authority  of 
the  Law.  At  the  same  time  he  left  to  the  Apostles  of 
the  Circumcision  the  liberty  he  claimed  for  himself.  For 
it  was  the  earnest  wish  of  the  great  Apostle  to  maintain 
the  comprehensive  unity  of  all  believers  in  Jesus  the 
Christ,  and  to  this  cause  indeed  he  fell  a  martyr;  but  the 

1  So  Acts  xxi,  20:     "Thousands  of  Jews  which  believe." 


Catholicism  155 

logic  of  the  situation  was  against  him,  and  the  antagonism 
between  nationalism  and  universalism  was  not  to  be 
ignored.  The  relations  of  the  parties  were  already  becom- 
ing more  strained  when  a  rushing  tide  of  religious  and 
patriotic  feeling  swept  over  Judea  in  response  to  the 
threatened  attacks  of  Caligula,  and  carried  the  Jewish 
Christians  with  it,  drawing  them  into  still  closer  relations 
with  the  national  theocracy.  With  this  came  the  triumph 
of  Judaism  in  the  Holy  City.  A  complete  change  took 
place  in  the  constitution  of  the  Mother  Church  when  its 
government  passed  from  the  Twelve  to  James  the  Lord's 
brother  and  a  body  of  presbyters  subordinate  to  him.1 
Under  his  leadership  during  the  Pharisaic  restoration  in  the 
reign  of  Agrippa,  the  Jerusalem  Christians  were  growing 
ever  more  intensely  devoted  to  the  legal  ordinances,  until 
the  Hellenistic  propaganda  became  an  abomination  in  the 
eyes  of  the  more  extreme,  and  the  demand  became  in- 
sistent that  Gentile  converts  should  be  brought  under 
submission  to  the  Law.  Soon  the  Judaists  took  the  aggres- 
sive, and  St.  Paul  found  himself  dogged  and  tormented 
by  the  undying  enmity  which  everywhere  followed  his 
footsteps  to  "bewitch"  his  converts  and  undo  his  work. 
In  Galatia  and  Corinth  he  maintained  himself  with 
difficulty,  but  in  Ephesus  his  lifelong  struggle  ended  in 
defeat.  There,  through  perils  and  sufferings,  facing  death 
every  day  (I  Cor.  xv,  30-32 ;  II  Cor.  i,  8)  he  kept  up  the 
unequal  conflict  until  his  heroic  persistency  at  last  was 
overborne  and  he  was  driven  from  the  city;  and  then 

1  "James  the  Just"  was  a  Jewish  legalist  of  the  narrowest  type,  and 
held  in  such  veneration  by  the  Pharisees  that,  transported  with  grief 
and  rage  at  his  execution,  they  poured  forth  to  meet  the  procurator  on 
his  way  from  Egypt  to  demand  vengeance  on  the  Sadducean  murderers. 
James  was  followed  in  office  by  Simeon,  a  cousin  of  Jesus,  in  accordance 
with  the  custom  of  Eastern  lands  that  the  headship  of  a  religious  com- 
munity should  be  assigned  to  the  descendants  of  the  founder,  a  custom 
which  obtained  in  regard  to  the  successors  of  Mohammed. 


156  Catholicism 

relentless  hatred  lurked  in  waiting  for  the  opportunity 
of  his  journey  to  Jerusalem  to  rouse  the  storm  that  over- 
whelmed him.  In  Asia  all  trace  of  his  long  labors  was 
swept  away.  The  Judaists  took  possession  of  the  field, 
and  five  years  after  Paul's  death  the  Apocalypse  bore 
witness  to  the  temper  of  the  new  Church  of  Ephesus. 

Up  to  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  the  Judaistic  party  main- 
tained its  power  and  prestige;  theirs  were  the  Mother 
Church,  the  primitive  type  of  Christianity,  the  sanction 
of  Jesus'  own  Disciples,  but  theirs  was  inevitably  the  los- 
ing side.  It  was  found  impossible  to  treat  the  Gentile 
world  as  the  proselyte  of  Judaism,  burdened  with  the  Law 
and  with  a  humiliating  inferiority  to  the  chosen  people. 
Hence  with  the  rapid  spread  of  Christianity  through  the 
chief  cities  of  the  Empire  it  passed  from  the  control  of  the 
Christian  Jews,  and  at  length  they  found  themselves 
compelled  to  modify  their  opinions  or  to  secede  from  the 
Christian  community.  Many  chose  the  latter  alternative, 
and  under  the  name  of  Ebionites  they  came  to  be  regarded 
as  a  heretical  sect,  although  their  heresy  was  rather  an 
obstinate  orthodoxy;  Judaic  Christianity  became  heretical 
when  the  Church  had  advanced  beyond  it  and  it  refused 
to  move  with  the  age. 

And  yet  though  the  Christianity  of  the  Hellenist  mis- 
sionaries gained  the  ultimate  victory,  the  important 
point  for  us  to  note  is  that  after  all  the  issue  between  them 
and  their  Palestinian  brethren  was  a  relatively  narrow 
one.  The  former  indeed  took  a  new  departure  and  with 
them  Christianity  entered  on  the  first  stage  of  its  conquer- 
ing career;  but  they  too  were  Jews  and  while  they  put 
aside  the  Law  as  an  obstacle  to  the  spread  of  the  new 
religion,  they  could  not  but  carry  with  them  the  ideas 
and  sentiments  of  their  ancestral  faith.  And  therefore, 
though  the  predominance  of  the  Jewish  party  could  not 
outlast  the  breaking  up  of  the  Jerusalem  Church,  the 


Catholicism  157 

spirit  of  Judaism  long  remained  potently  active  in  Chris- 
tianity, nor  indeed  has  that  religion  ever  entirely  freed  it- 
self from  this  alien  influence.  What  was  needed  from 
the  outset  for  the  religion  of  Jesus  was  a  declaration  of  its 
absolute  incompatibility  with  the  principles  of  Judaism, 
and  that  was  not  reached  even  by  the  great  Hellenist 
of  Tarsus.  The  abolition  of  the  Law  he  did  declare  most 
vigorously,  yet  a  leaven  of  Judaism  remained  to  work  in 
all  his  religious  thought,  and  he  "never  spoke  more  truly 
than  when  he  said  of  himself  that  he  was  a  Hebrew  of  the 
Hebrews."1  In  the  next  generation  the  opposition  of 
the  new  faith  to  the  old,  so  far  as  it  had  been  emphasised 
by  Paul,  was  quietly  put  out  of  sight  as  something  in- 
essential, or  indeed  misleading.  For  the  marked  distinc- 
tion between  Gentile  and  Jewish  Christians  was  rapidly 
disappearing  now  that  the  controversy  over  the  Law  was  a 
thing  of  the  past,  and  while  one  party  accepted  the  fait 
accompli  of  Gentile  predominance,  the  other  clearly  felt 
and  expressed  their  dependence  upon  the  Jewish  religion. 
The  Jews,  openly  hostile,  might  deny  the  claim  but  the 
Christian  controversialists  held  to  the  Jewish  derivation 
of  their  faith,  blind  to  the  heaven- wide  contrast  between 
the  religious  principles  of  the  Gospel  and  those  of  Judaism ; 
and  their  Christological  apologetic  was  the  first  step  in  a 
procedure  that  obscured  or  obliterated  the  real  points  of 
difference  which  parted  the  followers  of  Jesus  from  the 
pupils  of  the  Pharisees.  Nothing  seemed  left  to  check 
the  undercurrent  that  was  making  for  the  silent  assimila- 
tion of  the  Christian  religion  to  that  of  its  adversaries. 
The  Catholicism  of  the  second  century  smoothed  out  the 
traces  of  the  Judeo-Pauline  controversy  and  taught  an 
eclectic  Christianity  of  conciliation  and  compromise  be- 
tween a  purified  Judaism  and  a  diluted  Paulinism,  such 
as  might  prove  acceptable  to  men  of  all  minds  and  dis- 
1  Moore,  The  New  Testament  in  the  Christian  Church,  IT. 


158  Catholicism 

positions.  Peter  and  Paul  it  brought  together  in  amicable 
harmony,  explaining  that  the  Peter  rebuked  by  Paul  at 
Antioch  was  not  the  Apostle  but  one  of  the  seventy 
disciples.  In  this  amalgamation  of  Petro-Paulinism,  the 
doctrinal  basis  of  a  universal  church,  Peter  represents 
the  moderate  intra-Christian  Judaism  of  Catholicity, 
and  the  Judaic  character  of  early  Roman  Christianity  is 
the  real  significance  of  the  legend  that  Peter  was  the 
founder  of  the  Church  of  Rome.  The  complete  repudia- 
tion of  Judaism  was  left  to  the  advocacy  of  St.  Paul's 
eminent  disciple,  whom  the  Church  disowned,  and  when 
Marcion  rejected  the  Old  Testament  altogether  and 
insisted  that  its  God  was  not  the  God  of  Jesus,  it  was  not 
the  only  instance  of  a  clearer  apprehension  of  essential 
Christianity  than  lay  in  the  view  of  orthodoxy. 

The  Jews  have  been  called  the  People  of  the  Book,  but 
their  veneration  for  their  sacred  Scriptures  was  scarcely 
deeper  than  that  of  the  early  Christians.  The  Old  Testa- 
ment was  a  Christian  book,  and  the  only  "Scripture" 
of  the  Apostolic  Church.  For  it  was  the  general  conviction 
that  a  religion  to  commend  itself  must  appeal  to  antiquity : 
if  a  religion  was  divine  it  must  be  ancient;  and  so  the 
Christians  endeavored  to  meet  the  reproach  that  their 
religion  was  but  of  yesterday  by  claiming  for  it  descent 
from  the  religious  past  of  Israel.  It  followed  that  the 
Old  Testament,  which  enshrined  the  divine  revelation 
to  men  of  old,  was  freely  drawn  upon  to  authenticate  the 
new  faith,  and  the  Christian  convert  was  urged  to  the 
study  of  those  Holy  Scriptures  which  were  "able  to  make 
him  wise  unto  salvation."  The  Hebrew  Bible  became  a 
book  of  Christian  oracles.  It  could  not  be  doubted  that 
Moses,  the  prophets,  and  the  psalmists  had  foreseen 
and  foretold  the  new  dispensation  of  the  Gospel  times 
(John  v,  39,  46)  and  the  searching  of  Scripture  under  the 
influence  of  this  assumption  could  not  fail  to  establish 


Catholicism  159 

it  triumphantly.  The  first  Christians  discovered  many  a 
passage  of  holy  writ  that  predicted  the  sufferings  and 
death  of  the  Messiah,  and  Paul  calmly  states  that  Christ 
died  and  rose  again  "according  to  the  Scriptures."  The 
dogmatic  teaching  of  the  Pauline  Letters  rests  on  a 
foundation  of  scriptural  proof,  and  the  argument  some- 
times virtually  consists  in  a  series  of  proof  texts,  as  in 
Galatians  iii,  6-16.  The  testimony  of  Scripture  was  the 
easier  to  adduce  since  the  Apostle  was  an  adept  in  all  the 
artifices  of  rabbinic  exposition.  It  was  a  far-reaching 
principle  of  interpretation  that  everything  in  Scripture 
was  "written  for  our  sake, "  and  thus  whenever  convenient 
Scripture  language  could  be  understood  figuratively  and 
history  turned  to  allegory.  So  we  are  told,  "this  Hagar 
is  Mt.  Sinai  in  Arabia";  so  the  veil  on  Moses'  face  may 
have  as  required  one  significance  or  another,  and  on  a  hint 
from  Philo  the  Apostle  can  descend  to  a  foolish  verbal 
quibble  in  support  of  a  Messianic  rendering  of  the  phrase 
"Abraham  and  his  seed."  Such  a  way  of  dealing  with 
Scripture  provides  infinite  resources  by  which  it  can  be 
made  to  prove  anything  that  is  desired. z 

This  appropriation  of  the  Old  Testament  implied  the 
affiliation  of  Christianity  with  the  whole  Jewish  develop- 
ment, and  toward  the  end  of  the  century  we  find  it  the 
prevailing  view  that  the  new  religion  is  but  the  true  out- 
come and  fulfilment  of  the  elder — a  view  to  which  St. 
Paul  had  led  the  way  by  declaring  that  the  Christians  were 
the  true  Israel,  the  spiritual  children  of  Abraham. 2  This 
is  the  contention  which  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  seeks  to 

1  An  extreme  instance  of  arbitrary  quotation  appears  in  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews,  where  the  writer  finds  a  demonstration  of  the  necessity  of 
the  Christ's  sacrifice  in  a  psalm  which  declares  that  sacrifice  and  sin-offering 
God  has  not  required.     (Heb.  x,  5,  10;  Ps.  xl,  6-8.) 

2  The  Apocalypse  is  emphatic  on  this  point:  it  speaks  of  "those  who  call 
themselves  Jews  but  are  not";  that  is,  the  name  of  Jew  rightfully  belongs 
to  the  Christian. 


160  Catholicism 

maintain.  It  was  not  the  author's  purpose  to  effect  a 
compromise  between  Jewish  and  Gentile  Christianity  by 
means  of  mutual  concessions,  as  at  one  time  was  supposed. 
Rather  than  this,  the  book  implies  a  situation  in  which 
such  a  compromise  had  already  been  effected  and  the 
question  that  agitated  the  first  generation,  having  lost  its 
practical  importance,  had  died  out  and  been  forgotten. 
Acts  is  meant  to  be  a  historical  work,  but  the  author's 
conception  of  history  is  one  widely  different  from  that  of 
our  time.  "What  he  aimed  at  was  not  so  much  the  pre- 
sentation of  what  had  really  happened,  as  the  production 
of  a  beautiful  and  edifying  picture  of  ideal  truth,  which  to 
him,  as  to  the  whole  of  antiquity,  seemed  infinitely  higher 
than  objective  reality."1  It  is  evident  all  through  the 
book  that  what  the  author  has  at  heart  is  to  remove  the 
impression  that  Christianity  is  essentially  opposed  to 
the  Jewish  religion.2  Anything  that  points  to  such  op- 
position at  the  beginning  he  cannot  or  will  not  see,  for  he 
reads  the  early  story  in  the  light  of  his  own  present. 
Peter  and  Paul  are  of  one  mind,  and  the  former  is  the 
first  Apostle  to  the  Gentiles.  Each  of  the  great  leaders  in 
turn  is  the  central  figure  in  one  half  of  the  work,  suggesting 
to  the  reader  their  equal  claim  to  regard  and  that  neither 
was  greater  than  the  other.  It  is  naturally  the  figure  of 
Paul  that  most  requires  remodeling.  Of  his  strenuous 
insistence  on  the  abrogation  of  the  Law  there  is  no  inti- 
mation other  than  is  contained  in  the  pleasing  fiction  of 
the  "Council  of  Jerusalem,"  where  the  question  of  legal 
obligation  is  smoothed  over  and  all  differences  rubbed  out. 
The  originality  and  independence  of  the  great  Apostle 
are  conspicuously  absent  from  the  account  of  his  missionary 
labors.  The  apostleship  from  revelation,  the  proclama- 

1  Pfleiderer,  Primitive  Christianity,  ii,  292. 

2  "  The  author  of  Acts  never  wearies  in  his  attempt  to  prove  that  Chris- 
tians are  merely  the  true  people  of  Israel."    Wernle,  op.  cit.,  ii,  125. 


Catholicism  161 

tion  of  Christian  liberty,  the  issue  with  the  Twelve,  the 
long  conflict  with  the  Judaisers  have  all  disappeared  and 
left  no  trace.  The  real  Paul  is  scarcely  discoverable 
in  the  Catholicised  Paul  of  the  author's  picture;  the 
revolutionary  has  been  transformed  into  the  conservative. 
Again  and  again  the  Apostle  protests  that  he  is  a  Jew  and 
a  Pharisee,  that  he  serves  the  God  of  his  fathers  and  has 
nowise  offended  against  the  Law,  that  he  wishes  to  turn 
away  none  from  the  ancient  faith,  that  he  preaches  nothing 
other  than  the  Hope  of  the  Jews;  and  the  misrepresenta- 
tion culminates  in  the  impossible  tale  of  his  " purification" 
(xxi,  20-26)  to  acquit  himself  of  the  charge  of  teaching 
in  opposition  to  the  Law.  So,  too,  whenever  the  con- 
troversy over  "that  way"  is  brought  to  the  attention  of 
Roman  officials  it  is  declared  to  be  a  purely  Jewish  question, 
and  in  this  it  plainly  appears  that  the  book  of  Acts  is  in 
effect  an  apology  for  Christianity — pointing  to  a  time 
when  the  civil  authority  had  assumed  a  menacing  attitude 
toward  the  new  society — whose  object  is  to  claim  for 
it  the  same  freedom  and  protection  which  were  assured  to 
the  Jewish  religion  in  the  Roman  State,  on  the  ground  that 
Christianity  is  nothing  else  than  that  religion  in  its  true 
development. 

The  same  idea  is  the  central  theme  of  the  gospel  of 
Matthew,  the  ecclesiastical  gospel  which  supplies  a  com- 
pendium of  Christian  doctrine  and  of  rules  for  the  Chris- 
tian life,  and  whose  Catholic  temper  gained  for  it  the  first 
place  in  the  New  Testament  Canon.1  In  its  view  the 

x"  Matthew  occupies  the  standpoint  of  the  Church,  the  building  of 
which  he  alone  foretells  in  the  triumphant  words  of  xvi,  18.  In  his  eyes 
the  Church  forms  the  highest  disciplinary  authority,  and  is  the  Keeper  of 
all  the  heavenly  means  of  grace  (xviii,  16,  20).  Here  we  find  the 
primitive  Catholicism  already  complete  in  its  essential  features,  and  this 
gospel  has  exerted  its  enormous  influence  upon  Christendom  because  it  was 
written  by  a  man  who  bore  within  him  the  spirit  of  the  growing  Church 
universal."  Julicher,  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament,  pp.  309  and  314. 
zz 


1 62  Catholicism 

Law  and  the  Prophets  are  still  authoritative,  but  in 
their  Christian  interpretation,  which  makes  them  simply 
documents  prophetic  of  the  life  and  teaching  of  Jesus  the 
Messiah.  Fulfilment  of  prophecy  certifies  the  statements 
of  the  gospel.  In  the  phrase  continually  recurring:  "this 
is  come  to  pass  that  it  might  be  fulfilled  which  was  spoken 
by  the  prophet,"  the  author's  special  purpose  appears 
of  giving  to  every  important  event  in  his  narrative  the 
sanction  of  this  fulfilment.  And  the  words  of  Jesus  are 
to  be  received  not  because  his  sweet  reasonableness,  his 
"grace  and  truth,"  commend  their  appeal  to  the  hearts 
of  men,  but  because  inspired  writings  of  the  past  have 
foretold  his  ministry.  Again,  Jesus,  the  Jew  whose 
genealogy  has  been  traced  to  Abraham,  is  represented  as 
only  attacking  false  interpretations  and  applications  of  the 
Law,  and  never  the  Law  itself;  is  even  represented  as 
saying  (xxiii,  2),  "The  Scribes  and  Pharisees  sit  in 
Moses'  seat :  all  things  therefore  whatsoever  they  bid  you, 
these  observe  and  do";  or  again  (v,  17),  "Think  not  I  am 
come  to  destroy  the  law,  or  the  prophets :  I  come  not  to 
destroy  but  to  fulfil.  Till  heaven  and  earth  pass  away 
one  jot  or  one  tittle  shall  in  no  wise  pass  from  the  law  till 
all  be  fulfilled."  Papias  tells  us  that  everyone  translated 
as  best  he  could  the  Aramaic  Logia-Collection  of  Matthew, 
or  Levi  the  Publican,  and  we  may  add  that  everyone 
edited  it  to  please  himself.  In  the  Logia  as  it  came  to 
him  the  Evangelist  found  the  sayings  referred  to,  and 
they  are  plainly  insertions  by  a  Jewish-Christian  editor 
who  wished  to  claim  the  Lord's  authority  for  the  tenets 
of  his  party.  x  Our  author  however  does  not  seek  to  main- 

1  Such  is  the  case  with  the  prohibition  to  go  to  the  Gentiles  or  the  Sa- 
maritans in  x,  5.  The  whole  chapter  is  a  manual  of  instruction  and  ex- 
hortation addressed  to  the  missionaries  of  the  Church  in  the  guise  of  a 
commission  given  by  Jesus  to  the  Twelve,  and  in  this  place,  as  in  the  others, 
the  Jewish-Christian  sentiment  expressed  is  strikingly  at  variance  with  the 


Catholicism  163 

tain  that  the  Mosaic  Law  is  binding  upon  Christians — that 
issue  was  dead  and  buried;  it  is  rather  that  the  Teacher 
who  first  showed  men  the  true  meaning  of  the  Law  points 
to  the  general  agreement  of  the  old  and  new  dispensations. 
Yet  it  was  in  vain  to  reject  the  old  Law  in  the  letter  while 
retaining  it  in  spirit,  and  it  is  the  legal  spirit  that  domi- 
nates the  religious  in  this  Roman  gospel  of  the  third 
generation.  When  the  task  of  the  Christian  missionaries 
is  summarised  in  the  last  words  of  their  glorified  Lord: 
"Go  ye  and  make  disciples  of  all  nations  .  .  .  teach- 
ing them  to  observe  all  things  whatsoever  I  have  com- 
manded you,"  we  see  that  in  the  view  of  the  Evangelist 
it  was  the  mission  of  Jesus  to  give  mankind  command- 
ments. And  so  in  principle  the  Law  was  perpetuated 
in  the  Church,  although  it  was  just  the  Law  in  princi- 
ple which,  as  Paul  and  Jesus  taught,  was  to  be  done 
away. 

The  so-called  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews1  follows  another 
line  of  argument  to  show  that  Christianity  is  the  legiti- 
mate heir  of  the  Old  Testament  revelation.  It  is  not 
concerned  with  the  Law  as  a  code  of  moral  practice,  but 
rather  with  its  ceremonial  ordinances,  with  sacrifice  and 
priesthood.  Because  these  are  so  significant,  so  imposing, 
so  divine,  in  their  Christian  fulfilment  is  the  final  truth 

context;  but  inconsistencies  of  this  sort  gave  little  trouble  to  the  writers 
or  readers  of  those  days.  For  an  earlier  instance,  see  how  the  iQth  verse 
appended  to  Psalm  li  clashes  with  its  sentiment  and  contradicts  its 
statements. 

1  The  Epistle  is  lacking  in  any  form  of  address  to  the  community  to 
which  it  was  sent,  and  the  superscription,  "To  the  Hebrews,"  of  which 
there  is  no  evidence  before  the  end  of  the  second  century,  rests  on  the  same 
untrustworthy  tradition  which  assigns  the  authorship  to  Paul.  There 
can  be  little  doubt  that  it  was  written  to  the  Church  in  Rome  by  one  of  its 
members — then  living,  banished  or  a  fugitive,  in  some  place  outside  Italy — 
toward  the  end  of  the  persecution  under  Domitian,  or  about  95  A.D. 

Von  Soden,  The  Early  Christian  Literature,  248-272.  Julicher,  Introduc- 
tion to  the  New  Testament,  148-174. 


1 64  Catholicism 

of  religion.  It  is  the  writer's  earnest  endeavor  to  prove  that 
the  ideas  of  the  ancient  system  are  retained  by  Chris- 
tianity, only  its  forms  give  place  to  more  perfect  forms 
and  the  type  is  merged  in  the  antitype.  The  Epistle 
agrees  with  the  prophets  and  psalms  that  it  is  impossible 
for  the  blood  of  bulls  and  goats  to  take  away  sin;  but  while 
they  insist  on  the  worthlessness  of  the  sacrificial  ritual 
because  their  requirement  is  inward  repentance  and 
spiritual  renewal,  the  Epistle  urges  the  inadequacy  of  the 
old  sacrifices  in  order  to  substitute  another  and  a  better 
one.  There  is  no  change  in  principle  but  only  in  the 
nature  of  the  offering.  The  whole  meaning  of  the  Christ's 
function  in  relation  to  God  and  to  man  hangs  on  forms 
supplied  by  the  old  covenant  and  spiritually  reproduced 
in  the  new.  It  follows  that  Jewish  institutions  are  to 
be  explained,  not  by  the  history  of  the  past,  but  by  re- 
ference to  the  future.  Our  author's  eyes  are  fixed  on 
the  scriptural  picture  of  Jewish  worship  as  drawn  in  the 
Books  of  Moses.  The  Camp,  the  Sacrifice,  the  Veil,  the 
Holy  of  Holies  engage  his  deepest  interest,  but  only  in 
their  symbolic  interpretation;  to  him  all  these  things  are 
prophetic  types  of  heavenly  realities  which  Christianity 
has  brought  to  light,  and  this  thesis  is  maintained  by  the 
method  of  allegorical  exegesis  so  largely  employed  by 
Philo — whom,  by  the  way,  the  Church  Fathers  of  the 
fourth  century  had  come  to  regard  as  a  Christian  theo- 
logian. Playing  fast  and  loose  with  the  Scripture  text 
was  not  a  monopoly  of  Alexandria;  it  was  an  art  cul- 
tivated by  the  Rabbins  of  Palestine  as  well,  and  St.  Paul 
could  practice  it  on  occasion,  as  we  have  seen;  but  the 
Alexandrian  method  was  based  on  the  dualistic  scheme  of 
Platonism,  and  this  brought  it  into  sympathetic  relation 
with  Greek  habits  of  thought  and  enabled  the  Greek  mind 
to  assimilate  Christianity  to  itself.  Throughout  the 
Epistle  the  antitheses  recur  of  shadow  and  reality,  created 


Catholicism  165 

and  uncreated,  earthly  and  divide,  transient  and  enduring ; 
what  is  needed  for  the  understanding  of  Scripture  is  to 
recognise  behind  the  image,  or  type,  the  archetype  it 
represented,  and  the  more  artificial  and  far-fetched  the 
methods  of  attaining  this  recognition,  the  more  convinc- 
ingly they  would  appeal  to  those  instructed  in  such 
methods,  the  only  ones  compatible  with  the  nature  of  the 
Sacred  Writings.  For  it  was  not  to  be  supposed  that 
Moses  would  communicate  the  divine  revelation  in  the 
common  language  of  daily  life  accessible  to  everyone. 
The  obvious  meaning  of  the  sacred  text  might  content  dull 
intellects  that  could  not  see  beyond  appearances,  but 
the  enlightened  would  seek  the  deeper  truth  concealed 
within  it;  and  knowing  that  the  material  and  concrete 
are  but  manifestations,  or  rather  suggestions,  of  the 
ideal,  they  would  regard  facts  and  events  as  in  themselves 
matters  of  profound  indifference  and  having  worth  only 
as  symbols  of  eternal  truth.  Such  a  way  of  dealing  with 
things  of  the  past  seems  to  moderns  who  have  acquired 
the  historical  sense  but  childish  jugglery,  and  the  creations 
of  typology  a  house  of  cards  that  will  topple  over  at  the 
touch  of  reason.  Yet  the  card  house  has  shown  itself  a 
durable  structure.  The  typology  of  this  Epistle  has 
engendered  a  conception  of  Christianity  which  makes  it 
the  spiritual  continuation  and  fulfilment  of  the  sacerdotal 
principle  of  which  the  old  convenant  knew  only  the 
material  forms  and  the  earthly  adumbration ;  the  parallel- 
ism it  would  establish  between  the  conditions  of  Christian 
salvation  and  the  ritual  institutions  of  Judaism  has  led 
Christians  of  many  generations  to  look  for  the  ancestry  of 
their  religion  to  the  Jewish  priesthood  rather  than  to  the 
Prophets  of  Israel.  Christ  it  sets  forth  as  the  true  High 
Priest  of  Christians,  who  has  accomplished  the  redemptive 
work  which  the  gifts  and  sacrifices  of  his  Jewish  prototype 
prefigured,  and  now  he  stands  within  the  eternal  Taber- 


166  Catholicism 

nacle  offering  his  medi^tional  intercession.1  And  so 
Jesus  succeeds  to  the  office  and  title  of  his  murderer: 
the  Prophet  of  the  human  spirit  whose  message  was  that 
free  communion  with  the  Father  in  heaven  is  the  native 
birthright  of  every  child  of  man,  retracts  that  message, 
interposes  between  earth  and  heaven  to  restrict  that 
communion  to  the  channel  of  his  priestly  mediation,  and 
returns  to  the  ruling  conception,  or  misconception,  of  the 
old  religions.  "This  Epistle,"  Von  Soden  remarks, 
"laid  an  essential  part  of  the  foundation  of  the  Catholic 
Church  of  the  future.  She  needed  only  to  substitute  for 
the  heavenly  High  Priest  an  earthly  representative — 
the  Pope — and  for  his  heavenly  offering  an  earthly  repeti- 
tion of  the  same — the  Mass." 

In  reference  to  the  point  under  consideration  we  may 
note  again  the  exceptional  position  of  the  fourth  gospel 
among  the  books  of  the  New  Testament .  In  the  view  of  its 
author  Judaism  and  Christianity  are  sharply  contrasted 
and  mutually  conflicting  religions,  and  his  hostile  attitude 
toward  "the  Jews"  is  everywhere  apparent.  It  is  signifi- 
cant that  on  two  occasions  Jesus  is  made  to  say  to  the 
Jews:  "It  is  written  in  your  law,"  and  from  the  few 
brief  allusions  to  the  Old  Testament  Scriptures  it  appears 
that,  except  as  a  collection  of  passages  prophetic  of  the 
Christian  future  (v,  39  and  46)  they  possess  no  interest 
for  the  Evangelist ;  to  his  mind  the  Christian  religion  is  an 
absolutely  new  one.  We  have  here  one  of  the  many  diverg- 
ences of  view  in  the  New  Testament,  full  of  instruction  for 
us,  which  the  Church  simply  ignored  when  it  took  the  early 
writings  in  the  lump  on  the  naive  assumption  that  all  in- 
spired Apostles  must  have  taught  the  same  divine  truth. 

1  "Unlike  St.  Paul  this  writer  stands  in  no  personal  relation  to  the  person 
of  Christ.  He  ever  continues  in  the  sphere  of  discussions,  analogies,  and 
syllogisms,  and  we  scarcely  ever  discover  in  him  the  heart-throb  of  simple 
and  direct  religious  feeling."  Von  Soden,  op.  cit.,  262. 


Catholicism  167 

Here  again,  as  in  his  covert  protest  against  messianic 
delusions,  the  Evangelist  found  himself  powerless  to 
check  or  change  the  tendencies  of  the  Christian  mind. 
Whatever  he  thought,  or  we  may  think,  Christianity 
ought  to  have  been,  as  matter  of  fact  it  has  been  in  spirit 
and  principle  a  perpetuation  of  Judaism. x  To  what  extent 
this  is  the  case  may  be  seen  in  the  valuable  work  of 
Prof.  Toy,  Christianity  and  Judaism,  whose  plan  is  to 
follow  the  development  of  the  ideas  and  beliefs  of  Judaism 
from  their  origin  on  into  the  forms  they  assume  in  Chris- 
tianity. For  example,  the  Judaic  idea  of  God  was  taken 
over  by  Christianity.  The  Jews  had  emptied  the  con- 
ception of  everything  concrete  and  could  only  say  what 
He  is  not.  He  was  described  entirely  by  negative  predi- 
cates— uncreated,  imperishable,  unchangeable,  invisible, 
incomprehensible;  and  then  angels  and  demons  had  to  be 
introduced  for  a  connecting  link  between  this  transcendent 
Deity  and  the  world  of  men.  The  Church  did  not  adopt 
the  extreme  position  of  later  Judaism,  which  anticipates 
Herbert  Spencer  in  pronouncing  God  absolutely  un- 
knowable by  human  intelligence,  but  the  Deism  so  long 
the  orthodox  theology  was  practically  a  close  approach 
to  it.  The  Supreme  Being  dwelling  aloof  from  men's 

1  "All  the  ideas  of  the  Old  Testament  which  had  led  men  to  Pharisaism 
were  formally  adopted.  The  central  idea  of  Israel's  creed,  that  of  salva- 
tion by  machinery,  won  a  complete  triumph  over  the  central  idea  of  Christ's 
creed,  that  of  salvation  by  spiritual  growth.  The  false  dualism  of  the 
Jews,  the  total  separation  of  heaven  from  earth,  of  God  from  man  and 
nature,  became  the  basis  of  the  philosophy  of  Christendom.  The  external- 
ism,  the  ceremonialism,  the  literalism,  the  materialism,  the  pessimism,  the 
asceticism,  the  exclusiveness,  the  uncharitableness  of  the  Jews  entered 
into  the  life  and  blood  of  Christianity.  The  war  that  Judaism  had  waged 
against  freedom — the  inward  freedom  which  is  the  counterpart  of  spiritual 
life — was  renewed  by  Christianity  and  carried  on  with  deeper  skill,  with 
ampler  resources  and  on  an  immeasurably  larger  scale.  The  audacious 
claim  of  Israel  to  be  God's  chosen  people  was  matched  and  even  out- 
rivaled by  the  claim  of  the  Church  to  have  inherited  a  complete  monopoly 
of  the  grace  and  favor  of  God."  The  Creed  of  Christ,  171. 


i68  Catholicism 

distant  adoration  in  the  solitude  of  His  unapproachable 
majesty  returned  to  dispossess  the  God  revealed  by 
Jesus,  and  reappears  in  varying  guise  in  Augustine's  foreign 
despot,  Anselm's  feudal  lord,  Calvin's  capricious  tyrant, 
and  Paley's  'retired  mechanician.  The  Christian  con- 
ception of  God  remained  shadowy  and  vague ;  the  heavenly 
Father  faded  into  a  deified  abstraction,  at  most  a  roi 
faineant,  and  the  Christ  became  the  real  God  of  the 
Christian  religion,  as  he  had  virtually  come  to  be  in  the 
mind  of  Paul.  For  whenever  God  is  exalted  to  a  height 
above  the  reach  of  man's  communication  with  Him  a 
mediating  power  becomes  a  necessity,  and  then  goes  on  to 
fill  the  whole  field  of  men's  religious  consciousness. 

If  the  Christians  seem  to  have  worshipped  two  Gods, 
we  must  remember  that  the  monotheism  they  inherited 
from  Judaism  was  a  conception  imperfectly  realised  by 
the  Jewish  mind.  This  appears  in  the  part  assigned  the 
heathen  gods  in  the  government  of  the  world  and  the 
largely  independent  functions  of  the  guardian  angels  of 
the  nations.  Above  all,  the  vast  power  attributed  to 
Satan,  the  leader  of  the  hosts  of  evil,  is  inconsistent  with 
the  supremacy  of  the  one  God. x  In  spite  of  the  vigorous 
protest  against  Persian  dualism  by  one  of  the  writers  in 
Deutero-Isaiah,  Satan,  the  Adversary,  developed  in 
later  Judaism  into  a  figure  almost  reaching  the  proportions 
of  the  Mazdean  Angro  Mainyus,  and  as  such  he  passes 
into  Christianity.  Men  tremble  for  body  and  soul 
in  dread  of  his  manifold  malignant  activities,  and  human 
history  is  the  arena  of  a  conflict  between  divine  and  satanic 
powers.  Satan  is  the  prince  and  god  of  this  world  (John 
xiv,  30;  II  Cor.  iv,  4),  all  its  kingdoms  and  their  glory 
are  in  his  gift,  and  his  power  during  the  present  "age" 
is  represented  as  co-ordinate  with  that  of  God.  So  it 

1  In  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon  he  is  identified  with  the  serpent  of  the 
Eden  myth,  and  this  interpretation  was  accepted  by  the  Christians. 


Catholicism  169 

must  have  been  regarded  by  Irenseus,  Origen,  and  Augus- 
tine when  they  taught  that  the  Death  on  the  Cross  was  the 
ransom  due  to  Satan. 

The  Christian  belief  in  angels  is  an  adoption  of  the 
Jewish,  which  was  itself  an  importation  from  Babylonia 
and  Persia.  Angels  are  the  ministers  of  the  inactive 
Jewish  God  and  the  channels  of  all  communication  between 
heaven  and  earth.  Jesus  has  little  or  nothing  to  say  of 
these  intermediary  beings,  for  the  intimate  relations  of 
the  Father  with  His. human  children  leave  no  room  for 
their  activities.  The  Gospel  tradition  is  free  from  angel- 
ology,  and  it  is  only  in  the  prologue  and  epilogue,  the  stories 
of  the  birth  and  resurrection,  that  angels  appear.  The 
book  of  Acts  gives  us  several  instances  of  their  helpful 
ministry  to  saints  in  distress;  the  Revelation  is  populous 
with  angels,  and  little  else  than  a  record  of  their  various 
performances,  and  according  to  Hermas,  whose  knowledge 
of  the  angelic  host  is  amazing,  men  are  given  over  from 
one  angel  to  another  for  their  higher  education,  and 
have  much  more  to  do  with  them  than  with  God.  For 
the  average  Christian  the  religion  of  Jesus  was  all  but 
submerged  by  this  increasing  flood  of  Jewish  angelology. 

So  too  the  ideas  of  sin  and  righteousness  were  moulded 
by  Jewish  influence.  After  the  question  of  the  Messiah 
the  question  of  the  Law  was  the  chief  point  in  the  con- 
troversy with  the  Jews,  and  as  the  grounds  of  belief  in 
Christ  were  traced  to  Jewish  antiquity,  so  the  Law  was 
found  to  be  a  revelation  which  only  Christians  interpreted 
aright,  and  according  to  the  apologists'  conception  they 
alone  truly  observed  the  Law.1  Hence  the  declaration 

1  "How  often  in  the  history  of  religion  has  there  been  a  tendency  to 
do  away  with  some  traditional  form,  but  to  do  so  by  giving  it  a  new  inter- 
pretation. The  endeavor  seems  to  be  succeeding,  when  of  a  sudden  the 
old  meaning  comes  back  again.  There  is  no  tougher  or  more  conservative 
fabric  than  a  constituted  religion;  it  can  only  yield  to  a  higher  phase  by  be- 
ing abolished.  No  good  could  be  expected  from  the  twisting  and  turning  of 


170  Catholicism 

of  the  first  gospel  that  Christ  comes  not  to  destroy  but  to 
fulfil  the  Law,  that  one  jot  or  tittle  shall  in  no  wise  pass 
from  the  Law  till  all  be  fulfilled.  Christ  is  the  second 
Moses,  and  his  new  law  is  only  the  disclosure  of  the  true 
meaning  of  the  old.  The  Law  had  been  given  in  this 
Christian  meaning  and  the  Jews,  taking  it  literally,  had 
misunderstood  it.  The  ceremonial  law  had  only  a  transi- 
ent purpose  and  was  no  longer  obligatory;  its  real  signifi- 
cance lay  in  "  having  a  shadow  of  the  good  things  to 
come."  Practically  it  comes  to  this,  that  the  Law  for 
Christians  is  the  eternal  moral  law  which  according  to  the 
Stoics  and  St.  Paul  (Romans  iii,  14-15)  is  the  law  of 
nature  written  in  the  heart.  This  in  general  is  the  thesis 
enlarged  upon  by  Justin  and  Irenaeus,  and  while  this  new 
legal  religion  of  Christianity  is  something  essentially 
different  from  the  Gospel  of  Jesus,  it  might  seem  that  the 
evil  consequence  of  such  a  transformation  would  be 
minimised  by  the  purely  moral  conception  of  the  Law. 
Unfortunately  however  along  with  this  liberal  construc- 
tion of  the  Law  the  essential  notions  of  Jewish  ethics  were 
gaining  the  tacit  acceptance  of  the  Church.  The  ethical 
teaching  of  Christian  writers  was  founded  upon  that  of 
the  Jewish  Scriptures  and  later  non-canonical  books. 
The  morality  inculcated  by  Hermas  is  taken  almost 
entirely  from  the  Testament  of  the  twelve  Patriarchs. 
The  tract  called  The  Two  Ways  is  of  doubtful  origin,  and 
the  fact  that  a  Jewish  and  a  Christian  authorship  can  be 
maintained  with  equal  plausibility  for  the  same  writing 
testifies  to  the  similarity  of  later  Jewish  and  early  Chris- 
tian ethics.  Both  of  these  alike  are  dominated  by  the  idea 
of  legality.  Righteousness  consists  not  in  the  essence 
of  character,  but  in  the  keeping  of  commandments  imposed 

the  Law  in  the  early  Church  so  as  to  make  room  for  the  new  faith  beside 
it,  or  so  as  to  approximate  the  old  religion  to  that  faith."  Harnack,  What 
is  Christianity?  188. 


Catholicism  171 

by  divine  authority  and  sanctioned  by  threats  and  prom- 
ises, by  a  system  of  rewards  and  punishments ;  sin  is  the 
transgression  of  a  rule,  rather  than  a  staining  of  the 
soul.  Morality  attaches  to  the  deed,  not  the  doer;  con- 
duct is  no  longer  an  organic  whole,  but  is  broken  up  into 
separate  virtues  and  vices  that  remain  something  ex- 
ternal to  the  man  himself.  Again,  when  obedience  to 
law  is  made  the  standard  of  moral  values  the  notion  of 
"merit,"  of  works  of  supererogation  deserving  a  special 
reward,  is  a  natural  consequence;  and  with  this  notion 
the  technical  term  "perfection"  passed  from  Judaism  to 
Christianity.  In  the  gospel  of  Mark  Jesus  calls  on  the 
rich  young  ruler  to  give  his  possessions  to  the  poor  if  he 
would  inherit  eternal  life;  but  Matthew  has  it  if  he  would 
attain  to  the  perfection  that  goes  beyond  obedience  to 
the  commandments.  This  Jewish  doctrine  of  merit  was 
embraced  with  fervor  by  Catholicism,  although  Jesus 
distinctly  repudiates  it  in  the  parable  of  the  unprofitable 
servants.  On  the  other  hand  a  religion  of  law  can  only 
enforce  an  outward  show  of  duty,  and  when  legal  duties 
become  an  oppressive  burden  they  tempt  to  a  demoralising 
casuistry  prolific  in  devices  to  evade  unpleasant  obliga- 
tions. The  Pharisees  were  masters  of  this  art  and  the 
Jesuits  of  after  days  showed  themselves  apt  pupils. 

In  the  Jew's  worship  of  an  abstract  Law  God  became 
a  complicated  series  of  commandments,  and  His  service 
a  chaos  of  obediences.  The  great  transforming  power  of 
religion,  a  generous  uplifting  of  the  soul  to  a  devotion  of 
self -forgetting  love,  was  checked  and  chained  to  a  meticu- 
lous observance  of  petty  regulations  that  took  the  name 
of  duties  to  God.  It  was  this  religion  of  slavery  to  a  task- 
master that  Jesus  strove  to  revolutionise.  In  his  lectures 
entitled  "The  Influence  of  Jesus"  Phillips  Brooks  brings 
out  in  his  own  beautiful  way  how  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount  is  dominated  by  the  conception  of  God  as  Father. 


172  Catholicism 

This,  he  says,  is  "the  Key  which  alone  can  unlock  its 
meaning."  And  its  meaning  is  that  the  spring  of  human 
righteousness  is  in  a  personal  relation,  a  relation  of  rever- 
ence, trust,  and  love  to  the  heavenly  Father. 

The  inwardness  of  the  Gospel  was  indeed  by  no  means 
wholly  lost  to  the  life  of  Christian  men,  but  the  Judaic 
inheritance  remained  a  potent  counteracting  influence. 
Very  early  the  Church  felt  itself  called  upon  to  legislate, 
to  supply  its  members  with  a  code  of  practical  rules. 
The  Deutero-Pauline  Epistles  give  us  lists  of  household 
commandments  laying  down  the  duties  of  wives,  children, 
and  slaves  with  corresponding  directions  for  fathers, 
husbands,  and  masters.1  In  the  later  Pastorals  the 
household  regulations  give  place  to  those  affecting  sex 
and  class.  In  I  Timothy  the  subjection  of  woman  to 
man,  rather  than  of  wife  to  husband,  is  insisted  on,  and 
there  follow  detailed  commands  for  bishops  and  deacons 
and  a  long  string  of  ecclesiastical  ordinances.  So  Titus 
is  a  compilation  of  class  commandments  with  special 
practical  rules  applying  to  all  sorts  of  cases  and  relation- 
ships. The  keynote  of  all  is  the  demand  for  obedience, 
and  its  tendency  the  formulation  of  rules  to  govern  the 
conduct  of  life.  And  so  the  Church,  losing  faith  in  the 
untrammeled  conscience,  and  giving  up  the  appeal  to 
the  inward  man,  by  degrees  fell  back  into  the  fatal  exter- 
nalism  of  the  Jew,  and  while  rejecting  his  national  law 
substituted  for  it  a  legalism  of  its  own,  the  binding  author- 

xCol.  iii,  18,  iv,  i;  Eph.  v,  22-vi,  9.  In  I  Peter,  ii,  I3~iii,  7,  we 
have  a  similar  table  revised  in  keeping  with  the  circumstances  of  the 
time.  The  duty  of  the  wife  in  the  case  of  a  mixed  marriage  is  pointed  out, 
and  a  rule  laid  down  concerning  simplicity  of  dress;  and  since  the  writer 
would  urge  patient  endurance  under  persecution,  the  first  command  upon 
his  list  is  that  of  obedience  to  the  emperor  and  to  governors.  We  find 
(v,  1-5)  that  the  pastoral  office  has  developed  in  the  Church,  and  the 
mutual  duties  of  the  elders  and  their  flock  are  prescribed  after  the  manner 
of  the  household  table. 


Catholicism  173 

ity  of  fixed  rule  in  faith  and  practice.  It  is  plain  from 
every  point  of  view  that  "the  attempt  to  crush  the  new 
religion  into  the  categories  of  the  old  lost  the  ground  that 
had  been  won  by  the  destruction  of  these  very  categories 
by  the  new  faith."1 

If  the  Christian  mind  has  failed  to  perceive  the  essential 
antagonism  between  the  Gospel  principles  and  those  of 
Judaism,  that  blindness  is  the  measure  of  its  failure  to 
grasp  the  meaning  of  the  Gospel.  For  one  thing,  it  means 
all  that  horrified  the  Pharisees  in  the  conduct  and  teaching 
of  Jesus.  Their  inquisitorial  agents  discovered  that  he 
never  fasted,  that  he  disregarded  the  ceremonial  ablu- 
tions, that  he  rejected  the  whole  system  of  sacred  taboos, 
for  he  told  the  people  that  nothing  going  into  a  man  from 
without  can  defile  him,  but  the  things  that  come  out  of 
him  are  those  that  defile  the  man.  Above  all  he  was  a 
persistent  Sabbath  breaker,  and  dared  to  dethrone  the 
most  venerated  of  Jewish  ordinances  by  the  revolutionary 
declaration  that  the  Sabbath  was  made  for  man  and  not 
man  for  the  Sabbath.  In  all  this  controversy  with  the 
devotees  of  the  Law  and  the  Tradition  Jesus  was  not 
merely  assailing  specific  ritual  practices,  but  the  principle 
of  ritualism,  and  in  any  and  every  form  it  was  banished 
from  the  circle  of  his  disciples.  "It  is  characteristic  of 
the  essence  of  Jesus'  view  of  life  that  he  instituted  no  act 
of  a  ritual  nature."2  On  the  contrary  his  mission  was  to 
raise  religion  from  the  dead,  to  free  it  from  the  cerements 
of  rigid  externalism  and  bring  it,  a  warm  and  living  thing, 
into  the  hearts  and  consciences  of  men.  His  Gospel 
means  the  infinite  love  of  God  the  Father,  His  free  pardon 
and  restoration  of  the  repentant  sinner;  it  means  the 
spiritual  freedom  of  man,  his  native  capacity  for  goodness 
and  for  the  aspiration  to  perfection.  All  then  that  tends 
to  separate  the  Father  from  the  child,  all  sacerdotalism, 

1  Wernle,  op.  cit.,  ii,  102.  a  Holtzmann,  Life  of  Jesus,  521. 


174  Catholicism 

or  barring  of  their  direct  communion  by  so-called  media- 
tors, all  sacramentalism,  or  mechanical  restrictions  on  the 
action  of  the  Divine  Spirit  within  the  spirit  of  man,  all 
materialisation  of  the  spiritual  life  by  the  formalism  of 
routine  piety — devotional  "practices"  in  place  of  the 
love  of  God  and  fixed  penances  in  place  of  the  contrite 
heart :  all  this  ought  to  be  known  for  what  in  truth  it  is,  a 
relapse  into  the  spirit  of  the  old  religion  from  which 
Jesus  strove  to  deliver  his  people. 

Finally,  the  Church  itself  in  principle  was  an  inheritance 
from  Judaism.  All  primitive  religion  is  a  tribal  relation 
to  the  god,  and  so  in  Israel  it  was  always  the  affair  of  the 
nation,  for  Jehovah's  covenant  was  with  His  people  as  a 
whole.  When  with  the  Exile  the  national  existence  came 
to  an  end,  religion  was  left  the  sole  bond  of  social  unity, 
and  it  was  a  religious  community  under  the  government 
of  its  High  Priest  that  returned  to  settle  in  the  Persian 
province  of  Judea.  Jewish  religion  was,  according  to  the 
only  known  theory  of  religion,  the  relation  of  this  com- 
munity to  God,  a  relation  now  determined  by  a  codified 
system  of  law.  The  sentiment  of  individual  piety,  a 
growth  of  the  years  of  exile,  was  not  excluded  by  this 
communal  constitution  of  religion,  and  in  the  early  days  it 
found  ardent  expression,  but  the  tendency  was  steadily 
to  repress  it,  to  reduce  the  individual  to  a  member  of  the 
Church,  as  of  old  he  had  been  a  member  of  the  clan.  In 
the  time  of  Jesus  religion  meant  for  the  Jew  a  church 
with  a  legal  constitution,  and  to  be  religious  meant  to 
belong  to  the  church.  The  term  Church  (Quahal :  in  the 
Septuagint  E/ocXr)<jfa)  was  used  by  the  Jews  to  denote 
the  whole  body  of  the  people  in  its  relation  to  God.  The 
Christians,  a  community  called  of  God  and  ruled  by  His 
Spirit,  took  over  this  title  as  descriptive  of  themselves, 
and  whatever  the  novelty  of  the  Christian  faith,  the 
Christian  Church  by  the  very  name  appeared  to  be  the 


Catholicism  175 

successor  of  the  old  theocracy.  Moreover,  the  Jewish 
Church  was  the  unity  of  the  people  of  God  on  earth  estab- 
lished as  an  ecclesiastical  institution — a  very  definite 
concrete  reality;  and  so  the  Christians,  regarding  them- 
selves as  the  true  Israel,  the  new  people  of  God,  were  led 
to  feel  that  their  religious  society  must  be  constituted  on 
the  same  ecclesiastical  principles.  It  was  not  only  in  the 
Church  of  Jerusalem  that  this  idea  prevailed.  For  St. 
Paul  too  the  Christian  Church,  as  the  legitimate  heir  of 
the  Old  Testament  promises,  was  the  true  church  of 
God,  not  a  modern  construction  but  claiming  unbroken 
descent  from  antiquity:  a  position  which  seems  much 
the  same  as  that  of  the  Anglo-Catholics  in  relation  to 
Rome. * 

And  so  the  Church  came  back  with  its  authority,  with 
its  intolerance:  the  institution  " where  men  would  order 
the  attitude  of  our  inmost  hearts  toward  our  God."  It  is 
true,  the  ill  effects  of  an  evil  principle  do  not  at  once  dis- 
close themselves.  The  Jewish  Law  was  in  the  long  run 
fatal  to  the  true  piety  that  only  lives  in  freedom,  yet  we 
learn  from  the  Psalms — the  Hymn  books  of  the  second 
Temple — that  for  generations  after  its  introduction  the 
pious  found  it  no  burden  but  welcomed  it  with  joy.  And 
so  in  the  early  Church,  where  the  new  enthusiasm  held 
full  sway  and  organisation  was  loose  or  lacking,  the 
Christian  fellowship  was  a  life  of  individuals  in  the  equality 
of  a  personal  inspiration.  But  ways  that  are  broad  and 

1  "St.  Paul  fought  for  the  universalism  of  Christianity  and  the  religion 
of  love  in  place  of  that  of  legalism:  what  he  really  attained  was  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Christian  Church  with  the  new  legalism  of  faith  and  the  creed, 
with  the  return  of  all  the  Jewish  sin  of  fanatical  intolerance, .  .  .  pronounc- 
ing as  he  did  that  all  outside  the  fold  were  doomed  to  perish."  Wernle, 
op.  tit.,  i,  309  and  339. 

The  persecution  of  the  Jews  in  medieval  times  was  in  a  sense  retributive 
— a  case  of  chickens  coming  home  to  roost,  for  the  spirit  of  intolerance  that 
prompted  it  was  itself  a  heritage  from  Judaism.  That  villany  it  taught 
the  Christians  and  they  bettered  the  instruction. 


176  Catholicism 

smooth  at  first  may  be  those  that  lead  to  destruction,  and 
of  these  one  ran  to  Pharasaism  and  the  other  to  medieval 
Rome.  With  the  waning  of  enthusiasm  on  the  one 
hand  and  the  growing  instinct  of  domination  on  the 
other,  a  more  elaborate  organisation  was  framed  for  the 
Christian  communities  and  a  new  Church  arose  to  succeed 
the  elder.1  It  tended  to  centralise  in  the  capital  of  the 
world,  as  for  the  Diaspora  the  Church  had  centered  in  the 
Holy  City;  and  so  the  Jewish  idea  in  its  Christian  form 
entered  on  a  new  lease  of  power  to  last  through  many 
centuries. 2  It  was  with  this  idea  Jesus  took  issue  when  he 
spoke  direct  to  the  individual,  to  the  independent  con- 
science, for  "  wherever  men  realise  their  individuality  and 
individual  responsibility,  there  the  authority  of  the 
Church  ceases"  (Wernle).  When  Jesus  wakened  the 
religious  consciousness  and  brought  it  face  to  face  with 
God,  that  was  an  implicit  rejection  of  the  claims  of  every 
ecclesiastical  organisation.  It  is  common  to  speak  of 
Jesus  as  the  founder  of  the  Church :  there  cannot  be  a 
completer  misconception.  Jesus  called  his  disciples  the 
light  of  the  world,  the  salt  of  the  earth,  as  he  had  likened 
the  kingdom  to  the  leaven  in  the  meal  and  the  pungent 
mustard  seed.3  It  would  have  been  in  contravention  of 

1  "The  Christian  Church  took  the  place  of  the  Jewish,  and  its  claims 
are  mostly  the  same:  external,  ceremonial,  legal,  and  theological.    Jesus' 
words  condemn  his  own  church  down  to  the  present  day."    Wernle,  op. 
tit.,  i,  95. 

2  "After  the  Christian  churches  had  begun  to  take  the  form  of  a  new 
spiritual  empire  wide  as  the  Roman  empire  itself,  there  grew  up  a  conception 
that  the  new  Ecclesia  Dei  whose  limits  were  the  world  was  the  exact  counter- 
part, though  on  a  larger  scale,  of  the  old  Ecclesia  Dei  whose  limits  had 
been  Palestine."     Hatch,  Organization  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches,  141. 

3  Holtzmann  (p.  255)  argues  that  these  parables,  like  those   of   the 
Tares  and  the  Net,  are  pairs,  or  parallels,  expressing  the  same  thought. 
If  that  of  the  mustard  seed  is  meant  to  signify  the  great  expansion  of  the 
kingdom,  a  nut  or  an  acorn  would  have  better  served  for  the  figure;  for  in 
fact  the  mustard  seed  does  not  grow  into  a  very  large  bush,  nor  is  it  the 
smallest  of  all  seeds. 


Catholicism  177 

his  principles  and  aims  to  form  any  special  organisation 
of  his  followers  distinct  and  apart  from  the  world  at 
large.  And  none  of  them,  he  said,  was  to  be  called 
Master  or  Teacher,  for  they  were  all  brethren;  none 
was  to  assume  an  authority  which  should  trench  upon 
the  equality  of  all.  This  was  to  attack  the  principle 
of  hierarchy,  which  puts  one  man's  religious  life  under 
the  tutelage  of  another,  and  to  vindicate  the  spiritual 
independence  of  all  men.  In  the  teaching  of  Jesus  re- 
ligion is  personal  or  it  is  nothing;  a  man's  relation  to 
God  is  not  held  through  the  mediation  of  a  religious 
institution,  but  in  the  heart-felt  bond  of  a  filial  com- 
munion. And  so  what  Jesus  "founded"  was  a  spiritual 
fellowship,  or  rather  that  arose  spontaneously  in  so 
far  as  a  new  religious  consciousness,  a  new  aspiration 
to  the  higher  life,  a  new  devotion  of  love  to  God  and  man 
were  a  common  spirit  animating  all  and  drawing  all 
together.  Such  a  fellowship  differs  from  a  Church  as 
vitality  from  mechanism.  The  Church  was  a  product 
of  later  times,  an  organisation  built  up  gradually  as  ideas 
of  authority  and  creed  and  priest  and  sacrifice  took  rise 
and  gathered  power;  and  it  is  evident  that  from  the  first 
the  movement  to  ecclesiasticism  was  a  reactionary  move- 
ment, and  that  Catholicism  is  the  Judaising  of  Chris- 
tianity. x 

1  "When  a  spiritual  movement  begins  to  materialise  into  form,  credal 
or  institutional,  that  form  is  necessarily  in  the  manner  of  a  degradation 
from  the  primal  spiritual  impulse.  Institutionalised  religion  is  always 
a  degeneration  from  spiritual  religion.  .  .  .  No  institution  can  be  perfectly 
true  to  its  ideal,  but  it  is  the  peculiar  misfortune  of  the  Church  that  since 
the  sum  and  substance  of  Christian  practice  is  proclaimed  to  be  loyalty 
to  the  ideal,  the  mind  and  spirit  of  the  Master,  it  has  come  about  that 
few  institutions  are  so  false  to  their  professed  ideal  as  is  the  Christian 
Church.  If  one  thing  is  more  obvious  than  another  it  is  that  the  Church 
to-day  is  precisely  that  which  Jesus  opposed  in  Judaism  and  died  to  break 
through."  Edward  Lewis,  "The  Failure  of  the  Church,"  in  the  Atlantic 
Monthly,  December,  1914.  Vol.  cxiv,  No.  6. 


178  Catholicism 

2.     The  Antecedents  of  the  Sacraments 

While  the  general  idea  of  the  Church,  as  an  institution 
of  religion,  as  a  spiritual  State,  was  taken  over  from 
Judaism,  the  realisation  of  the  idea  was  affected  by  other 
influences,  and  much  of  the  material  in  the  structure  of 
Catholicism  was  borrowed  from  other  sources — its  doc- 
trine from  Greek  philosophy,  its  discipline  from  Roman 
administration,  and  its  worship  from  Asiatic  rituals. 

We  find  the  Pauline  communities  already  in  possession 
of  two  sacraments,  Baptism  and  the  Lord's  Supper,  and 
it  has  been  the  teaching  of  the  Church  for  ages  that 
both  owe  their  origin  to  the  ordination  of  Jesus  himself. 
But  it  said  of  him  at  the  outset  that  he  would  not  baptise 
with  water  like  John,  but  with  the  Holy  Spirit,  and  except 
in  the  latest  additions  to  Matthew,  the  Synoptics  breathe 
no  word  ascribing  to  Jesus  the  institution  of  the  initiatory 
rite  by  which  converts  were  received  into  the  Church.1 
Nor  is  there  in  Paul's  writings  any  trace  of  a  command 
by  Jesus  to  baptise,  and  that  nothing  was  known  of  such 
a  command  in  apostolic  times  may  be  inferred  from  I 
Cor.  i,  17.  Later  on  the  rite  of  baptism  which  had  come 
into  use  was  traced  back  to  an  institution  by  Jesus  from 
the  natural  inclination  to  lend  the  sanction  of  the  Master 
to  the  apostolic  practice;  but  it  rests  on  the  mistaken 
assumption  that  it  was  his  purpose  to  found  a  religious 
community  as  John  had  done. 

As  to  the  Eucharist,  Mark  (xiv,  22—24)  gives  us  the 
account  of  what  took  place  at  the  Lord's  Supper  in  its 
simplest  form : 

As  they  were  eating  he  took  bread  and  when  he  had 
blessed  it  he  brake  it  and  gave  to  them  and  said,  Take  ye,  this 

1  The  appearance  of  the  Trinitarian  formula  in  Matthew  xxviii,  19, 
fixes  the  late  date  of  the  passage,  all  early  baptism  being,  as  is  well  known, 
"into  the  name  of  the  Lord  Jesus." 


Catholicism  179 

is  my  body.  And  he  took  a  cup  and  when  he  had  given  thanks 
he  gave  to  them  and  they  all  drank  of  it.  And  he  said  unto 
them,  This  is  my  blood  of  the  covenant  which  is  (has  been) 
shed  for  many. 

The  last  words  have  already  an  explanatory  turn  that 
gives  them  the  look  of  an  addition  to  the  words  of  the 
Lord.1 

The  text  of  Matthew  (xxvi,  26-28)  reproduces  that  of 
Mark  practically  without  variation  except  in  the  addition 
"shed  for  many  for  the  remission  of  sins."  Here  is  an- 
other step  in  the  way  of  amplification,  or  rather  a  turn 
in  a  new  direction;  the  blood  of  a  covenant  sealed  and 
clinched  a  treaty,  it  had  nothing  to  do  with  an  atoning 
sacrifice.  So  far  there  is  nothing  in  the  words  of  Jesus 
that  intimates  a  purpose  to  institute  a  memorial  rite 
which  should  be  continued  in  perpetuity,  and  if  the 
Evangelists  had  found  in  the  sources  they  drew  upon  any 
evidence  of  such  a  purpose  it  is  impossible  they  should 
have  suppressed  it.  In  the  third  gospel,  however  there 
appears  an  explicit  direction  given  the  disciples  for  the 
periodic  repetition  of  the  action  they  witnessed.  Luke 
writes  (xxii,  19-20): 

He  took  bread  and  when  he  had  given  thanks  he  brake 
it  and  gave  to  them,  saying,  This  is  my  body  which  is  given 
for  you;  this  do  in  remembrance  of  me.  And  the  cup  in  like 
manner  after  supper,  saying,  This  cup  is  the  new  covenant  in 
my  blood  which  is  shed  for  you. 

1  Such  it  would  seem  they  must  be  if  he  is  made  to  speak  in  the  past 
tense  of  a  blood  shedding  still  in  the  future.  And  so  he  does  speak  unless 
the  word  tn-xyvvbiu-vov  is  to  have  a  different  meaning  here  from  the  meaning 
it  has  elsewhere.  In  Matthew  xxiii,  35  we  read,  "all  the  righteous  blood 
shed  upon  the  earth"  from  Abel  to  Zachariah — that  means  the  blood  which 
has  been  shed;  and  in  Luke  xi,  50,  the  same  Greek  participle  is  so  rendered: 
"the  blood  of  all  the  prophets  which  was  shed  from  the  foundation  of  the 
world." 


i8o  Catholicism 

This  passage  is  borrowed  from  a  writing  earlier  than 
any  one  of  our  gospels,  St.  Paul's  First  Epistle  to  the 
Corinthians.  We  read  (xi,  23-25) : 

The  Lord  Jesus  in  the  night  in  which  he  was  betrayed  took 
bread  and  when  he  had  given  thanks  he  brake  it  and  said, 
This  is  my  body  which  is  broken  for  you;  this  do  in  remem- 
brance of  me.  In  like  manner  also  the  cup  after  supper, 
saying,  This  cup  is  the  new  covenant  in  my  blood ;  this  do  as 
often  as  ye  drink  in  remembrance  of  me. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  Evangelist  follows  the  Apostle 
with  substantial  exactness,  except  that  he  gives  only 
once,  in  reference  to  the  distribution  of  the  bread,  the 
injunction,  "this  do, "  and  in  place  of  the  repetition  of  it 
adopts,  with  a  single  change,  the  closing  words  of  Mark. J 

111  The  question  arises  whether  the  Evangelist  himself  interpolated 
into  his  narrative  these  sayings  derived  from  I  Cor.,  thus  displacing  an- 
other form  of  the  tradition,  or  whether  the  interpolation  is  due  to  a  later 
hand,  the  original  Lucan  narrative  having  in  that  case  closed  with  '  This 
is  my  body.'  In  favor  of  the  latter  is  the  fact  that  verses  190  and  20 are 
wanting  in  important  Western  MSS.,  and  the  omission  of  these  important 
words  is  as  difficult  to  explain  as  the  insertion  of  them  is  easy  to  account 
for.  The  omission  of  the  distribution  of  the  symbolic  cup  was  unwelcome, 
and  it  was  therefore  added  to  the  Lucan  account — which  originally  con- 
tained only  one  giving  of  the  cup,  without  any  reference  to  the  ritual  of 
the  Supper  (v.  17) — in  the  form  of  a  second  giving  of  the  cup  (v.  20)  by 
means  of  an  interpolation  derived  from  I  Cor.  Cf.  Westcott  and  Hort, 
Select  Readings,  64:  'These  difficulties  leave  no  moral  doubt  that  the  words 
in  question  were  absent  from  the  original  text  of  Luke.' 

"I  hold  that  we  have  in  this  shorter  Lucan  text,  as  preserved  by  Codex 
D,  the  oldest  account  of  the  Last  Supper.  .  .  .  There  follows  the  further 
consequence  that  the  words  in  Mark,  also,  who  is  followed  by  Matthew, 
'This  is  my  blood  which  is  shed  for  many,'  do  not  belong  to  the  oldest 
tradition,  but  are  an  addition  derived  by  Mark  from  the  Pauline  theology. 
...  In  I  Cor.  xi,  24ft  Paul  has  given  to  the  celebration  of  the  Lord's 
Supper  the  character  of  a  mystical  commemoration  of  the  death  of  Christ. 
This  new  conception  of  it  found  its  way  through  Mark,  the  disciple  of  Paul, 
into  the  Evangelical  tradition,  and  has  carried  with  it  the  alteration  of  the 
original  version  which  is  still  preserved  in  the  shorter  text  of  Luke.  This 
did  not  however  everywhere  displace  the  older  form  of  the  Holy  Commun- 


Catholicism  181 

What  then  was  the  source  of  St.  Paul's  information  on 
the  subject?  He  tells  us  in  the  words  introducing  his 
statement:  "I  received  of  the  Lord  that  which  also  I 
delivered  unto  you,  how  that  the  Lord  Jesus, "  etc.  This 
appeal  to  a  personal  revelation  can  scarcely  be  allowed 
the  value  of  historic  evidence — though  to  Paul  it  seemed  of 
greater  value.  Always  when  he  would  insist  on  the 
originality  of  his  gospel  and  emphasise  his  entire  independ- 
ence of  any  human  medium,  he  speaks  of  receiving  knowl- 
edge direct  from  God  or  Christ.  It  must  be  confessed 
that  as  a  safe  foundation  for  statements  of  fact  a  miracu- 
lous communication  from  the  spirit  world  leaves  something 
to  be  desired.  No  one  would  dream  of  impugning  the 
Apostle's  perfect  sincerity,  yet  it  might  not  be  difficult, 
we  may  suppose,  for  him  to  persuade  himself  that  the 
fundamental  truth  of  religion  must  have  been  taught  by 
Jesus  emblematically  in  that  breaking  of  the  bread  on  the 
eve  of  his  departure  from  the  world  to  which  the  tradition 
testified;  and  this  conviction  may  have  brought  to  him 
the  vision  that  confirmed  it.1  Now  what  we  find  in  all 
the  gospel  narratives  of  the  Last  Supper,  appearing  with 
a  growing  emphasis,  is  a  reference  to  the  death  of  Jesus 
viewed  as  an  atoning  sacrifice,  and  as  a  means  to  the 
making  of  a  new  covenant  to  supersede  the  covenant 
made  at  Sinai,  when  Moses  sprinkled  the  people  with 
the  blood  of  the  sacrifice.  These  are  distinctively  Pauline 


ion,  for  that  this  long  maintained  itself  in  wide  circles  of  the  Church  is 
proved  by  the  Communion  prayers  in  the  Didache  which  have  no  reference 
either  to  the  gospel  text  or  to  Paul."  Primitive  Christianity,  ii,  178-179, 

491-493- 

1  "  It  was  quite  in  the  manner  of  the  great  Apostle  to  regard  the  outcome 
of  his  own  matured  reflections  as  a  revelation  from  the  Lord.  That  he 
should  have  seen  in  the  rite  a  confirmation  of  the  dogma,  that  he  should 
have  cast  the  tradition  into  a  form  in  harmony  with  it,  and  also  that  his 
version  of  the  incident  should  have  been  incorporated  in  the  evangelical 
tradition,  was  only  what  we  might  expect."  Mackintosh,  op.  cit.,  65, 


182  Catholicism 

ideas,  they  are  cardinal  dogmas  of  the  Pauline  theology, 
and  they  are  ideas  utterly  foreign  to  the  mind  of  Jesus  who 
taught  the  free  unconditional  forgiveness  of  the  repentant 
sinner,  and  the  natural  relation  of  men  to  God,  that  of 
children  to  a  Father,  and  not  a  relation  founded  in  any 
covenant,  contract,  or  bargain.  It  is  impossible  to  believe 
that  Jesus  ever  spoke  words  in  countenance  of  doctrines 
that  contravene  the  essential  principles  of  his  Gospel; 
nor  can  we  admit  the  possibility  that  he  who  saw  so  clearly 
to  what  condition  externalism  had  brought  religion  could 
have  instituted  a  ritual  ordinance  as  a  last  bequest  to  his 
disciples.1  That  the  sacramental  idea  is  something  alien 
to  his  principles,  purposes,  and  methods,  runs  counter  to 

1  It  is  true  that  the  rites  and  ceremonies  of  religion  owe  their  origin 
to  a  spirit  of  devotion  which  seeks  in  them  an  expression  for  itself,  yet  all 
sacramentalism  holds  a  danger  for  us  that  we  have  need  to  guard  against. 
If  the  sacrament  be  regarded  as  pre-eminently  the  medium  of  communion 
with  the  Divine,  if  our  communion  at  its  deepest  and  closest  tends  to  be 
restricted  to  the  sacrament,  then  it  will  be  rather  harmful  than  helpful 
in  its  effect  upon  the  religious  life.  For  the  aim  of  the  religious  life  is  to 
come  into  close  and  living  union  with  God,  to  feel  His  presence  with  us,  to 
abide  in  Him  as  He  in  us.  Religion  is  the  bond  (religio)  of  this  fellowship, 
this  intimate  communion,  which  is  theoretically  the  end  of  all  religious 
practices,  sacraments,  and  rites.  But  God  is  a  spirit:  the  religious  relation 
is  wholly  spiritual.  The  sacrament  is  a  materialisation  of  it,  and  that  is 
unsafe.  To  maintain  a  real  communion  with  God,  to  keep  our  spirit  the 
temple  of  His  indwelling,  takes  effort,  a  tension  of  heart  and  will.  To 
partake  of  the  Bread  and  Wine  is  easy,  and  we  are  all  prone  to  take  the 
easiest  way;  and  so  the  danger  is  that  this  which  is  intended  for  an  aid  to 
communion  in  the  spirit  may  become  a  mechanical  substitute  for  that,  and 
the  reverent  communicant  leave  the  chancel  rail  satisfied  that  there  is 
no  more  for  him  to  do.  And  even  though  he  escape  the  utter  formalism 
of  a  Christian  Pharisee,  his  sacramentalism  leads  him  to  feel  that  it  is  not 
in  every  hour  of  life,  but  only  at  the  altar  he  comes  into  the  "  real  presence ' ' 
of  his  God.  Yet  our  communion  with  wife  or  child  knows  no  need  of  any 
mediation,  is  not  conditioned  by  any  stated  rite:  it  is  a  heart-union,  con- 
stant, incessant  as  the  heartbeats.  Why  should  our  communion  with 
God  be  other  than  this,  be  less  than  this?  What  communion  with  the 
heavenly  Father  was  ever  so  close,  so  intimate  as  that  of  Jesus,  and  is 
there  not  something  grotesque  in  the  thought  of  it  as  sacramentally  condi- 
tioned? 


Catholicism  183 

his  religion  of  the  spirit,  or  at  least  falls  below  its  level, 
is  evident  to  conservative  scholars  of  impartial  mind. 
Even  Holtzmann,  who  accepts  Paul's  as  the  best  version 
of  Jesus'  language — taking  "I  received  of  the  Lord"  to 
mean  I  received  from  Peter — nevertheless  insists  on  the 
implication  of  the  words  "this  do  every  time  you  drink." 
He  writes: 

Hence  it  is  apparent  that  Jesus  did  not  intend  this  obser- 
vance to  be  a  ceremonial  of  worship  in  the  Christian  com- 
munity, but  as  a  domestic  celebration  at  the  regular  meal. 
Even  in  this  act  he  did  not  wish  to  give  to  his  followers  any 
institution  of  a  liturgical  character.1 

Furthermore,  it  has  been  questioned  whether  in  fact 
Jesus  offered  the  wine  to  his  disciples.  Pfleiderer  consid- 
ers that  since  it  is  only  in  relating  the  distribution  of  the 
bread  the  synoptics  are  in  accord,  this  is  to  be  regarded 
as  the  historical  kernel  of  the  story  (see  also  Luke  xxiv, 
3°~3I»  35  >  and  Acts  ii,  42)  and  he  points  out  that  in  the 
love  feasts  of  the  Christians  it  is  only  the  breaking  of  the 
bread  that  is  spoken  of,  the  cup  and  its  symbolism  do  not 
appear;  moreover  these  gatherings  were  in  their  intent 
a  cheerful  celebration  of  brotherly  unity,  not  a  solemn 
commemoration  of  Jesus'  death.2  How  then  are  we  to 
understand  the  action  and  the  words  of  Jesus  in  the  break- 

1  Life  of  Jesus,  464.     See  Keim  to  the  same  effect,  Jesus  of  Nazara,  v, 

333-335- 

2 So  Rogers,  The  Life  and  Teaching  of  Jesus,  321:  "The  institution 
[i.e.  the  Eucharist]  when  first  it  meets  us  is  by  no  means  what  we  should 
expect  a  memorial  rite  to  be.  The  very  name  by  which  the  meeting  went 
at  which  it  is  supposed  that  it  was  celebrated — and  which  from  Paul's 
account  would  seem  to  be  identical  with  it — the  Agape,  points  to  a  different 
origin.  It  seems  to  have  been  a  social  gathering  of  the  Church,  and  this 
characteristic  hardly  could  have  assumed  the  prominence  it  did,  so  as  to 
supply  the  name,  if  the  rite  had  been  instituted  by  Jesus  himself  for  another 
purpose. 


1 84  Catholicism 

ing  of  the  bread?  What  he  really  had  in  mind  I  think 
may  be  inferred  with  a  fair  degree  of  probability  by  any 
one  who  has  followed  carefully  the  story  of  his  life.  When 
Jesus  sat  down  to  the  Last  Supper  with  his  disciples  on  the 
fatal  Thursday  night  that  put  an  end  to  their  earthly 
companionship,  he  was  well  aware  of  his  desperate  situa- 
tion. For  some  days  he  had  held  his  enemies  at  bay 
while  the  people,  excited  by  the  appearance  of  a  new  pro- 
phet, thronged  eager  and  curious  about  him.  But  their 
support  failed  him.  They  found  his  message  vague  and 
disappointing,  their  interest  cooled,  and  soon  they  stood 
aloof,  alienated  and  sullen.  Jesus  saw  himself  trapped  in 
this  Jerusalem  that  killed  the  prophets  and  stoned  the  mes- 
sengers of  God.  For  him  the  end  had  come ;  to  the  friends 
he  left  behind  him  he  must  commit  his  cause.  The 
sacrifice  of  his  life  he  was  prepared  to  make,  but  his 
cause — the  spiritual  kingdom  of  God,  the  reformation  of 
religion — that  must  not  be  abandoned.  Experience  had 
taught  him  that  the  Gospel  gained  its  strongest  hold  upon 
the  hearts  of  those  in  closest  communication  with  himself. 
Now  that  he  was  to  be  taken  away  he  felt  more  than  ever 
how  much  the  success  of  his  work  depended  upon  the 
attachment  to  his  person  of  those  who  should  carry  on  that 
work.  He  must  not  be  forgotten;  he  must  live  in  their 
hearts.  His  last  hope  was  that  death  should  not  break 
the  union  of  his  followers  with  his  spirit,  the  spirit  of  his 
devotion  to  the  cause  that  claimed  his  life.  As,  possessed 
with  these  thoughts,  he  blessed  and  broke  the  loaf  set 
before  him  there  flashed  upon  him  one  of  those  analogies 
which  appealed  so  constantly  to  his  vivid  imagination,  and 
giving  into  his  friends'  hands  the  broken  bread,  "This,"  he 
cried,  "is  my  body."  It  was  an  acted  parable  which  he 
confided  to  the  intelligence  of  love,  and  its  simple  meaning 
was  that  in  partaking  of  this  symbol  of  his  body,  of  his 
life,  the  disciples  united  themselves  with  him  and  with 


Catholicism  185 

one  another  to  form  one  body,  one  organic  whole.  The 
words  of  Jesus  have  no  relation  to  his  death:  they  point 
to  a  covenant  of  loyalty  entered  into  by  eating  together 
of  the  consecrated  food,  according  to  the  old  familiar 
idea  of  a  sacred  social  communion  which  underlay  all 
religious  feasts.  Even  to  one  who  would  double  the 
Prophet  with  the  Priest,  if  his  sympathy  makes  real  to 
him  the  tragic  scene  of  the  Last  Supper — shadowed  by 
treachery,  heavy  with  suspense,  the  heart  of  Jesus  throb- 
bing with  anxieties  and  longings — it  must  seem  incredible 
that  any  thought  of  formally  instituting  a  sacramental 
rite  could  then  have  crossed  his  mind;  and  the  Heidelberg 
Professor,  who  would  make  of  Jesus  an  ecclesiastic  and 
a  theologian,  wholly  concerned  at  such  an  hour  as  this 
with  the  foundation  of  Christian  doctrine  and  practice, 
must  seem  to  him  of  all  men  absorbed  in  special  studies 
the  blindest  to  anything  beyond  them. x 

That  some  stated  observance  in  commemoration  of 
Jesus  and  especially  of  his  death  should  have  taken  rise 
among  the  Christian  believers,  that  it  should  have  grown 
and  taken  form  from  this  memorable  scene,  and  that 
the  belief  should  become  generally  accepted  that  Jesus 
himself  must  have  given  directions  to  such  effect — all 
this  is  only  natural  and  seems  to  be  the  truth  of  the 
matter.  The  Apostle  Paul  found  it  easy  to  make  a  rite 
out  of  this  incident  of  the  disciples'  last  hour  with  the 
loved  Master  and  to  expand  his  simple  words  into  a  ritual 
formula.  At  first  the  blessing  and  breaking  of  the  bread, 
and  its  distribution  together  with  the  wine,  were  no  more 
than  a  ceremony  of  consecration  attached  to  the  common 
evening  meal,  the  Agape.  But  the  development  was 
rapid;  before  the  middle  of  the  second  century  the  sacra- 
ment of  the  Eucharist  appears,  separated  from  the  Agape, 
transferred  from  the  evening  to  the  morning,  united  with 

1  Schenkel,  The  Character  of  Jesus,  ii,  230-244. 


1 86  Catholicism 

the  worship  of  God,  and  with  the  Bishop  its  only  lawful 
celebrant;  and  already  in  the  language  of  Ignatius  and  of 
Justin  we  find  the  germs  of  the  coming  miracle  of  the 
Mass. 

There  remains  a  point  that  claims  attention  though  it 
has  no  great  importance  for  the  present  discussion. 
Whether  the  Last  Supper  was  in  fact  a  celebration  of  the 
Passover,  as  the  Synoptics  have  it,  is  a  vexed  question, 
and  the  weight  of  argument  appears  to  support  the 
negative.  Mark,  after  recounting  the  events  of  Wednes- 
day, tells  us  (xiv,  i),  " After  two  days  was  the  feast  of 
the  Passover."  According  to  this  the  Passover  began  on 
Friday  night,  and  this  is  the  date  generally  accepted  by 
scholars.  But  it  is  also  the  generally  accepted  view,  and 
seemingly  the  assured  fact,  that  Friday  was  the  day  of 
Jesus'  crucifixion.  This  however  proves  to  be  an  error 
if  the  Last  Supper  was  a  Passover  Supper.  In  that  case 
Jesus  must  have  been  crucified  on  Saturday;  but  this  can 
hardly  be  maintained,  for  Saturday  was  the  Sabbath, 
and  this  Sabbath  the  great  day  of  the  Passover  when  the 
activities  of  the  priests  and  people  and  labor  in  the  fields 
and  the  selling  of  goods  (Mark  xv,  21  and  46)  would 
have  been  impossible.  Besides  this,  the  question  of  date 
seems  to  be  decided  by  Mark's  words  referring  to  the 
day  of  the  crucifixion:  "When  even  was  come,  because 
it  was  the  Preparation,  that  is  the  day  before  the  Sabbath, " 
etc.  (Mark  xv,  42).  If  then  we  hold  that  the  crucifixion 
was  on  Friday  it  follows  that  the  Last  Supper  took  place  on 
Thursday,  the  night  before  the  Passover;  and  its  transfer- 
ence to  the  following  night  by  the  Synoptics  is  due  appar- 
ently to  the  later  doctrine  that  the  death  of  Jesus  was  the 
sacrifice  typified  by  that  of  the  paschal  lamb.  The  fourth 
Evangelist,  who  took  no  interest  in  the  Pauline  dogmas, 
went  back  to  the  original  tradition,  which  we  have  found 
in  Mark  (the  passage  last  cited),  that  Friday  was  the  day 


Catholicism  187 

of  the  crucifixion,  and  consequently  that  the  farewell 
supper  of  Jesus  with  the  disciples  was  held  on  Thursday 
night,  and  was  not  the  Passover  Supper.  It  was  doubtless 
Jesus'  intention  to  keep  the  Passover,  and  we  are  told  of 
arrangements  he  made  to  that  end,  but  probably  because 
rumors  reached  him  on  Thursday  of  the  plot  against  him 
and  the  treason  of  one  of  his  own  followers,  he  found  it 
necessary  to  advance  the  last  meeting  with  his  friends  to 
that  same  evening,  giving  them  time  to  find  their  way  back 
to  Galilee  in  safety. 

Schmidt  holds  that  the  saying,  This  is  my  body,  being 
suggested  by  the  analogy  of  the  paschal  meal,  must  be 
given  up  because  Jesus  "was  put  to  death  before  the  time 
had  come  for  eating  the  Passover."  But  if  the  saying  had 
no  reference  to  his  sacrificial  death,  the  fact  of  its  utterance 
before  the  Passover  does  not  render  it  improbable. 

When  we  consider  the  deep  impression  which  the 
doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  has  made  upon  Christian 
thought  since  Reformation  times,  and  how  it  has  been 
looked  upon  as  holding  the  central  place  in  the  Pauline 
theology,  and  not  rather  as  occasioned  by  the  demands 
of  the  anti- Judaic  polemic,  it  may  be  something  unexpected 
to  find  St.  Paul  the  creator  of  the  Christian  sacraments 
and  insisting  upon  their  supreme  importance  as  means 
of  salvation.  And  yet  his  conception  of  a  sacrament  as 
far  more  than  a  symbolic  rite  and  having  in  itself  a  super- 
natural efficacy,  intrinsically  operative  without  regard  to 
the  sentiments  of  the  recipient,  is  logically  consequential 
upon  his  doctrine  of  the  flesh  and  sin  and  moral  impotence 
and  the  necessity  of  being  saved  by  some  agency  external 
to  oneself.1  According  to  Paul  baptism  is  in  effect  a 
mystical  participation  in  the  death  of  Christ  through  the 

1  "  It  is  a  very  significant  fact  that  Paul  approves  the  custom  of  baptising 
living  Christians  for  the  dead,  in  order  to  extend  to  them  after  death  the 
blessing  of  baptism  and  to  ensure  their  resurrection."  Wrede,  Paul,  120. 


1 88  Catholicism 

submersion  and  emergence  from  the  water,  symbolical 
of  burial  and  resurrection.  He  that  is  washed  in  baptism 
is  sanctified  and  justified  in  the  name  of  Christ  by  the 
Spirit  of  God  (I  Cor.  vi,  n).  "Baptism  it  is  that,  in 
conjunction  with  belief,  actually  bestows  redemption  on 
the  individual"  (Wrede,  Paul,  122).  It  is  a  miracle 
and  a  mystery.  In  this  sacramental  dying  with  the 
Christ,  the  old  man  is  put  off,  the  body  of  sin  is  slain, 
the  believer  shares  in  all  that  was  achieved  upon  the 
cross  or  at  the  sepulchre  and  becomes  an  heir  of  the 
glory  which  the  Day  of  the  Lord  shall  reveal. 

And  now  the  life  issuing  from  this  new  birth  needs  to  be 
divinely  nourished  and  sustained  by  the  body  and  blood 
of  Christ  received  in  the  Lord's  Supper.  The  sacrament 
is  not  only  a  memorial  by  which  Christians  "do  show  the 
Lord's  death  till  he  come,"  it  is  the  means  by  which 
believers  maintain  that  bond  of  communion  with  the 
dead  and  risen  Lord  which  is  the  ground  of  salvation. 
St.  Paul  writes: 

The  cup  of  blessing  which  we  bless,  is  it  not  a  communion 
of  the  blood  of  Christ?  The  bread  which  we  break  is  it  not  a 
communion  of  the  body  of  Christ?  Seeing  that  there  is  one 
bread  we  who  are  many  are  one  body,  for  we  all  partake  of 
the  one  bread.  Behold  Israel  after  the  flesh:  have  not  they 
which  eat  the  sacrifices  communion  with  the  altar?  What  say 
I  then?  that  a  thing  sacrificed  to  idols  is  anything?  But  I  say 
that  the  things  which  the  Gentiles  sacrifice,  they  sacrifice  to 
demons,  and  not  to  God :  and  I  would  not  that  ye  should  have 
communion  with  demons.  Ye  cannot  drink  the  cup  of  the 
Lord  and  the  cup  of  demons ;  ye  cannot  partake  of  the  table  of 
the  Lord  and  of  the  table  of  demons.1 

These  words  are  highly  significant.     The  sacred  meal  in 
the  Pauline  churches  is  the  Christian  counterpart  of  the 
' 1  Cor.  x,  16-21. 


Catholicism  189 

sacrifices  offered  to  the  gods  of  the  heathens.  Just  as 
the  heathen  through  partaking  of  the  sacrifice  come  into 
mystic  communion  with  the  spirits  whom  their  rites  invoke, 
so  through  partaking  of  their  own  consecrated  bread  and 
wine  Christians  attain  communion  with  the  Lord.  The 
parallel  is  seen  to  be  exact  in  the  Apostle's  insistence  that 
the  one  communion  excludes  the  other.  And  the  sacra- 
ment has  the  sanction  of  an  awful  power.  They  who 
partake  unworthily  are  guilty  of  the  body  and  blood  of 
the  Lord.  If  they  fail  to  "discern"  the  Lord's  body — to 
appreciate  the  sacramental  significance  of  the  bread  and 
wine — they  eat  and  drink  judgment  upon  themselves. 
"For  this  cause,"  writes  the  Apostle,  "many  among  you 
are  weak  and  sickly  and  many  sleep."  In  all  this  Paul  is 
aiming  at  the  education  of  his  heathen  converts,  yet  he 
appears  to  sink  to  their  level  rather  than  raise  them  to 
a  higher.  Elsewhere  in  this  Letter  Paul  calls  the  Christian 
community  the  body  of  Christ,  in  that  all  the  brethren  are 
members  of  a  single  organism  animated  by  his  spirit,  and 
all  suffer  or  rejoice  together  in  the  joy  or  suffering  of 
each  one.  We  find  however  in  the  passage  cited  above 
that  Christian  fellowship  is  made  to  depend  upon  sac- 
rament alism:  "seeing  that  there  is  one  bread  (or  loaf)  we 
who  are  many  are  one  body,  for  we  all  partake  of  the  one 
bread."  Of  this  it  has  been  said : 


Paul's  conception  of  the  Christian  organism  is  a  fine  one, 
worthy  of  any  philosopher ;  the  greater  the  pity  that  he  cannot 
sustain  himself  at  this  level,  but  deems  it  necessary  to  buttress 
up  the  noble  spiritual  unity  he  dreams  of  with  a  means  sug- 
gested by  and  imitated  from  the  pagan  and  Jewish  religions  of 
sacrifice — to  wit  the  sacrifice  of  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ. 
From  the  heights  of  idealism  we  suddenly  drop  into  the  depths 
of  primitive  magic  and  fetichism.1 

1  F.  C.  Conybeare,  Myth,  Magic,  and  Morals,  255. 


190  Catholicism 

We  shall  come  presently  to  the  grounds  for  this  last 
statement. 

We  have  seen  how  the  fourth  Evangelist  ignores  and 
tacitly  rejects,  so  far  as  he  can,  the  messianic  belief  in  the 
Parousia  and  the  Judgment,  since  to  his  mind  the  rela- 
tions of  the  soul  to  the  Divine  are  not  future  events  which 
can  be  pictured  to  the  eye  of  fancy  as  scenes  of  a  drama. 
In  like  manner  sacramentalism  is  repugnant  to  his  religious 
thought  inasmuch  as  it  externalises  and  materialises  the 
inward  experiences  of  the  spirit.1  But  here  again  the 
Alexandrine  idealist  is  hampered  in  setting  forth  his 
higher  teaching  by  the  faith  and  practice  of  the  Church, 
and  his  inconsistencies  of  expression  are  imposed  upon  him 
by  the  Christian  tradition  which  cannot  be  dispossessed 
of  its  hold  upon  men's  minds.  Thus  his  doctrine  of  the 
new  birth  encounters  the  existing  rite  of  baptism,  and  he 
is  obliged  to  make  Jesus  say  that  a  man  must  be  born 
of  water  and  the  spirit  (iii,  5)  although  a  little  before 
we  have  had  John  declaring  that  the  baptism  of  the 
spirit  is  to  supersede  the  baptism  of  water.  At  the  same 
time  the  following  verses  (6-8)  show  that  the  Evangelist 
will  not  tie  the  action  of  the  Spirit  to  the  baptismal  rite. 
In  the  same  way  the  Evangelist  finds  difficulty  with  the 

1  Some  who  reject  the  deity  of  Jesus  can  see  nothing  else  in  the  fourth 
gospel  than  the  assertion  of  this  repugnant  doctrine,  but  the  following  tri- 
bute of  a  Unitarian  shows  a  truer  appreciation  of  its  author:  "The  spiri- 
tual freedom  and  insight  of  the  great  Evangelist  stand  out  in  startling  relief 
against  the  background  of  the  crystallising  traditions  and  fixed  institu- 
tions of  the  Church  in  the  fourth  decade  of  the  second  century.  Had  the 
church  possessed  a  tithe  of  the  spirit  of  him  who  substituted  a  foot  washing 
for  the  Eucharist,  suppressed  the  baptism  of  Jesus,  refused  to  be  bound 
by  gospel  books  and  ecclesiastical  tradition,  found  life  and  redemption 
in  the  essence  and  trend  of  Jesus'  teachings  and  not  in  forensic  fictions, 
understood  that '  the  letter  killeth '  and  let  his  present  ideal  speak  in  ways 
that  seemed  to  him  true, — stagnation  of  doctrinal  development,  a  rigid 
fixity  of  institutional  character,  and  a  deadening  imposition  of  external 
authority  on  the  consciences  of  men  would  have  been  impossible." 
Schmidt,  The  Prophet  of  Nazareth,  216-217. 


Catholicism  191 

Eucharist.  It  was  the  accepted  belief  that  the  bread 
and  wine  of  the  sacrament  had  in  themselves  power  to 
invigorate  the  spiritual  life,  that  in  the  physical  act  of 
partaking  of  these  holy  mysteries  was  the  communication 
of  divine  grace.  Our  author  could  only  do  his  best  to 
minimise  the  incongruity  of  such  an  idea  with  his  own 
system  of  thought,  naturally  with  little  success.  His 
sixth  chapter  opens  with  the  miracle  of  the  loaves  and 
fishes,  which,  like  every  other  in  this  gospel,  is  a  "sign,"  or 
symbolic  act,  whose  profound  signification  Jesus  reveals 
in  the  long  discourse  that  follows.  Its  text  is  obligingly 
furnished  by  the  people:  "What  sign  showest  thou 
that  we  may  see  and  believe  thee?  Our  fathers  did  eat 
manna  in  the  desert ;  as  it  is  written,  He  gave  them  bread 
to  eat."  This  although  they  had  followed  Jesus  "be- 
cause they  saw  his  miracles"  (2)  and  had  been  so  greatly 
stirred  by  the  astonishing  feat  of  the  day  before  (15). 
In  Matthew  and  Mark  the  same  demand  follows  the  same 
miracle;  it  seems  strange  that  the  people  should  make  at 
once  so  much  and  so  little  of  this  wonder-working.  Jesus 
replies  to  the  people  that  he  himself  is  the  true  bread  that 
cometh  down  from  heaven  and  giveth  life  unto  the  world. 
"I  am  the  bread  of  life,"  are  his  words,  emphasised  by 
reiteration.  The  fathers  ate  manna  in  the  wilderness 
and  they  died;  if  a  man  eat  of  the  living  bread  that  has 
come  down  from  heaven  he  shall  live  forever.  It  is  an 
essential  point  of  the  Evangelist's  theology  that  the  divine 
Logos  is  the  life  of  humanity.  Jesus  is  not  a  Jewish 
Messiah,  nor  a  prophet  sent  to  proclaim  spiritual  truth 
and  call  men  to  the  higher  life;  he  is,  in  his  own  being,  the 
Truth  and  the  Life.  The  bread  he  gives,  of  which  he 
that  eats  shall  never  hunger  more,  is  not  his  word,  it  is 
himself,  for  he  himself  is  the  Word.  These  figurative 
conceptions  are  to  be  found  in  the  writings  of  Philo;  there 
too  we  may  read  that  the  manna  is  the  symbol  of  the 


192  Catholicism 

Logos,  for  he  is  the  bread  of  God  which  nourishes  the  soul 
with  good  thoughts,  words,  and  deeds.  Salvation  then  is 
gained  by  assimilation  of  the  Divine  Life,  and  the  first 
condition  is  to  have  faith  in  Him,  the  incarnate  Logos 
(29).  To  those  who  come  to  him  and  believe  in  him  (35) 
Jesus  will  give  himself — that  is,  his  spirit.  For  all  this  is 
Alexandrinism;  all  is  to  be  taken  in  a  spiritual  sense. 
Here  however  the  attempt  must  be  made  to  harmonise 
the  Philonic  doctrine  with  the  established  institution  of 
sacramental  communion  with  the  Christ.  And  so  John 
goes  on:  "the  bread  that  I  give  is  my  flesh  for  the  life  of 
the  world.  Verily,  I  say  unto  you,  except  ye  eat  the  flesh 
of  the  Son  of  Man  and  drink  his  blood,  ye  have  no  life  in 
you. ' '  The  people  who  take  these  words  literally  can  make 
no  sense  of  them,  and  even  the  disciples  murmur :  this  is  a 
dark  saying,  who  can  understand  him?  The  evangelist 
would  intimate  how  remote  from  his  point  of  view  is  any 
thought  of  receiving  spiritual  nourishment  from  material 
food,  and  Jesus  replies:  "Do  you  stumble  at  this?  it  is 
the  spirit  that  quickeneth,  the  flesh  profiteth  nothing; 
the  words  I  have  spoken  unto  you  are  spirit  and  are  life." 
The  sacrament  of  the  Lord's  Supper  held  too  high  a  place 
in  the  Christian  cult  for  one  who  wrote  of  Jesus'  ministry 
to  pass  it  by  in  silence ;  it  only  remained  to  attach  it  as 
firmly  as  possible  to  the  Alexandrine  conception  of  the 
Logos  as  the  nourishment  of  the  souls  of  the  faithful. 
In  this  intimate  connection,  which  gives  the  sacrament 
a  symbolic  or  representative  character,  is  the  ground  of  its 
observance — not  in  the  occurrences  of  the  Last  Supper, 
all  mention  of  which  is  missing  from  the  fourth  gospel. 
Its  place  is  taken  by  the  "sign"  of  the  multiplication  of 
the  loaves  and  the  discourse  on  the  bread  of  life,  and  that 
the  Evangelist  would  transfer  the  origin  of  the  sacrament 
to  this  occasion  is  seen  in  what  he  borrows  from  the 
synoptic  narrative:  in  the  interjected  statement  that  the 


Catholicism  193 

Passover  was  at  hand  (4),  in  the  emphatic  introduction 
of  the  Eucharist  phrase  at  the  breaking  of  the  bread  (n), 
and  in  the  designation  of  Judas  as  the  traitor  (71). 

In  truth  however  idealism  has  no  affinity  with  material- 
ism, and  the  endeavor  to  merge  or  combine  the  ideas  of 
the  fourth  gospel  with  the  current  sacramentalism  could 
only  issue  in  incoherence  and  confusion. 

He  that  eateth  my  flesh  and  drinketh  my  blood  hath 
eternal  life;  for  my  flesh  is  true  meat  and  my  blood  is  true 
drink.  He  that  eateth  my  flesh  and  drinketh  my  blood 
abideth  in  me  and  I  in  him.  As  the  living  Father  hath  sent 
me  and  I  live  by  the  Father,  so  he  that  eateth  me  he  also  shall 
live  by  me. 

These  words,  we  are  told,  are  to  be  spiritually  understood : 
the  flesh  profiteth  nothing.  The  true  nourishment  of 
the  spiritual  life  can  only  be  assimilated  by  the  spirit. 
The  source  of  that  life  is  in  God;  the  Logos  has  life  from 
the  Father  and  he  communicates  his  life  to  all  who  abide 
in  him.  But  how  does  eating  his  flesh  and  drinking  his 
blood  bring  men  to  this  abiding  in  him?  What  place 
and  what  part  have  this  flesh  and  blood  in  the  gift  of 
eternal  life  ?  These  are  terms  of  mere  metaphor,  or  else 
they  stand  for  an  order  of  ideas  hopelessly  irreconcilable 
with  those  which  the  fourth  gospel  was  written  to  set  forth. 
At  this  time  the  doctrine  of  the  sacraments  destined  to 
hold  sway  in  Christendom  was  already  taking  shape,  and  it 
might  be  seen  that  the  effort  of  the  fourth  gospel  to  trans- 
form and  spiritualise  it  had  little  chance  of  receiving 
serious  consideration.  The  development  of  that  doctrine 
was  conditioned  by  the  environment.  Christianity 
planted  itself  in  the  Greco-Roman  world  by  means  of 
adopting  the  religious  ideas  and  usages  common  to  many 
peoples  which  ran  back  to  an  origin  in  primitive  animism ; 
and  it  could  not  have  gained  acceptance  without  doing 
13 


194  Catholicism 

so.  It  is  one  of  the  debts  we  owe  to  Edward  Freeman 
that  he  strove  to  impress  upon  his  generation  a  sense  of 
the  continuity  of  history,  to  show  how  arbitrary  and  how 
misleading  are  the  terms  "ancient"  and  "modern"  as  ap- 
plied to  it,  and  the  breaking  up  of  man's  biography  into 
separate  periods  bounded  by  salient  events,  such  as  the 
birth  of  Jesus,  or  the  abdication  of  Romulus  Augustulus, 
or  the  taking  of  Constantinople  by  Mahomet  II.  It  is 
at  least  equally  important  for  us  to  recognise  that  the 
chasm  which  seems  to  yawn  between  what  we  call  historic 
and  prehistoric  time  has  no  real  existence,  that  from  the 
beginning  the  ages  run  on  one  into  another  and  the  current 
of  man's  life  keeps  one  unbroken  flow.  Their  failure  to 
realise  this  truth  and  to  acquaint  themselves  with  the 
constitutive  ideas  of  primitive  society  is  the  weakness 
of  such  great  historians  as  Grote  and  Mommsen,  and 
leads  them  to  erroneous  views  of  historic  institutions. 
Thus  they  represent  the  Greek  and  Roman  gentes  as 
composed  of  families,  and  the  family  as  the  basis  or  unit 
of  the  social  system.  That  unit  however  is  the  gens,  or 
clan,  which  is  long  anterior  to  the  family  in  its  earliest 
form,  and  so  far  from  being  founded  upon  the  family 
excludes  it  from  itself.  For  exogamy,  or  marriage  without 
the  clan,  is  essential  to  its  constitution,  and  hence  husband 
and  wife  must  belong  to  different  clans.1  While  of 
value  in  every  field  of  historic  research,  and  in  many  of 
supreme  importance,  the  study  of  prehistoric  life  is 
indispensable  to  one  who  would  know  something  of 
religion,  for  here  are  the  roots  of  all  after  growth. 2  They 

1  The  whole  subject  of  clan  organisation  and  the  development  of  the 
family  is  treated  with   profound    research   in  Lewis  Morgan's  Ancient 
Society. 

2  "No  one  can  pretend  to  a  knowledge  of  the  great  historic  religions 
of  the  world  who  has  not  traced  their  outlines  back  to  the  humble  faiths 
of  early  tribes  from  which  they  emerged."    Brinton,  Religions  of  Primitive 
Peoples,  10. 


Catholicism  195 

who  inquire  into  the  ' '  origin ' '  of  religion  will  learn  that  its 
origin  is  in  the  heart  of  man  and,  potentially,  it  comes  with 
man  into  the  world.  A  rapid  glance  at  the  conditions 
under  which  it  first  appears  may  be  worth  our  while. 

The  sacramental  idea  of  communion  with  the  Divine 
through  a  material  rite  derives  from  the  beliefs  of  primitive 
men  embodied  in  the  practice  of  sacrifice — the  worship 
of  the  nomad  totem  clan  formed  from  kinship  in  the 
maternal  line.  Than  this  no  earlier  form  of  social  organisa- 
tion can  be  discovered ;  whatever  any  precedent  condition 
may  have  been — such  as  the  horde,  sexually  promiscuous, 
like  the  hordes  of  other  gregarious  animals — it  is  not 
distinctly  traceable,  nor  does  it  afford  any  indication  of 
religion.  To  learn  the  original  meaning  of  sacrifice  we 
have  to  divest  ourselves  of  all  the  acquired  knowledge  of 
the  ages  and  try  to  enter  into  the  mental  workings  of  the 
children  of  our  race,  when  the  world  lay  before  their 
eyes  undefined  and  shadowy,  a  manifold  blur  of  indeter- 
minate existences  and  happenings  where  anything  was 
possible.  Where  there  is  no  knowledge  of  essential  rela- 
tions, or  natural  laws,  things  behave  as  though  they  had 
no  law  and  one  does  not  know  what  they  will  do  next. 
Experience  consists  of  a  stream  of  events  that  just  occur, 
disjointedly,  like  the  incidents  of  a  dream,  and  it  follows 
that  the  dreams  of  primitive  men  were  no  less  real  to 
them  than  the  life  of  their  waking  hours.  For  they  had 
learned  nothing  of  the  distinctions  that  give  definiteness 
and  system  to  our  world.  All  things  were  confused 
together;  there  was  no  division  between  organic  and 
inorganic,  between  life  and  consciousness ;  river,  rock,  and 
tree  were  of  one  kind  and  there  was  no  difference  between 
man  and  beast.  Said  Turgot:  "Man  gazes  upon  the 
deep  ocean  of  being,  but  what  he  sees  is  the  reflection 
of  his  own  face";  it  was  true  at  least  of  the  first  men  who 
shaped  all  outward  things  in  the  likeness  of  themselves, 


196  Catholicism 

and  saw  everywhere  about  them  the  operation  of  personal 
life  and  will.  Life  was  the  conception  that  dominated 
all  the  workings  of  the  mind.  Nothing  was  inanimate. 
We  can  understand  how  motion  might  seem  a  sign  of  life, 
and  the  running  stream  or  the  leaping  flame  be  taken  for 
living  things,  but  motionless  objects  were  equally  alive, 
and  when  one  fell  and  bruised  himself  upon  a  rock  it  was 
the  rock  that  struck  the  blow.  Again,  since  the  changes 
man  originates  in  his  environment  are  due  to  the  action 
of  his  will,  so  all  other  changes  that  came  within  his 
observation  primitive  man  ascribed  to  the  like  cause; 
every  object  that  in  any  way  affected  him  he  endowed 
with  a  life  and  will  like  his  own.  In  such  a  world  man 
could  not  but  feel  his  helplessness.  He  was  surrounded 
by  a  multitude  of  beings  of  like  nature  with  himself  and 
having  unknown  power  over  him  for  good  or  ill.  His 
physical  helplessness  had  spurred  his  intellectual  develop- 
ment, and  his  intellectual  helplessness,  in  view  of  the 
dark  and  perilous  uncertainties  of  his  situation,  led  him 
into  the  way  of  religion,  through  the  feeling  that  it  was 
possible  and  necessary  to  establish  permanent  friendly 
relations  with  some  of  these  higher  powers. 

His  first  attempts  were  governed  and  guided  by  two 
ruling  ideas.  First,  if  all  things  in  his  world  had  life, 
some  had  it  more  abundantly ;  man  found  the  animal  of  all 
living  things  the  one  that  came  nearest  to  himself,  and 
how  near  it  is  hard  for  us  to  conceive.  If  even  today  it 
be  true  that  "measured  by  psychic  standards  the  interval 
between  the  lowest  man  and  the  highest  is  a  hundred  fold 
greater  than  that  between  the  lowest  man  and  the  highest 
brute ' ' z  this  second  interval  was  far  less  in  prehistoric  time. 
In  that  far-off  day  man  was  nearer  to  his  animal  origin 
by  many  thousands  of  years,  and  nearer  to  the  animal 
nature  by  the  lack  of  all  those  distinctively  human  char- 

1  S.  D.  McConnell,  Christianity:  An  Interpretation,  112. 


Catholicism  197 

acteristics  which  during  those  ages  have  been  evolved. 
Hence  came  his  feeling  of  close  affinity  with  his  fellow 
creatures  which  is  shown  by  its  survival  in  the  Centaurs 
of  the  Greeks  or  in  the  amours  of  Pasiphae,  while  the 
wisdom  of  Cheiron,  the  ingenious  Puss  in  Boots — a  folk- 
tale of  every  language, — the  wide-spread  Beast-Fable, 
and  the  famous  epic  of  Reynard  the  Fox  witness  to  a  time 
when  human  traits  and  human  intelligence  were  quite 
literally  attributed  to  animals.  Then  too,  souls  being  one 
in  kind,  nothing  was  easier  than  their  transmigration. 
It  was  undoubtedly  true  that  "the  soul  of  our  grandam 
might  haply  inhabit  a  bird,"  or  any  creature  one  met 
with  be  a  friend  of  former  days.  And  such  transmigra- 
tion might  take  place  in  life  as  well  as  after  death;  at  any 
time  a  man's  soul  might  go  out  of  his  body  and  enter  that 
of  an  animal.  To  this  belief  we  trace  the  disguises  of 
Zeus  with  Leda  and  Europa,  the  Swan  Maidens  and 
Frog  Princes  of  German  Mahrchen,  and  the  competitive 
metamorphoses  of  the  Magician  and  the  Princess  in  the 
Arabian  tale,  and  from  this  descend  the  long-lived  super- 
stitions of  the  Man-tiger  and  the  Were- wolf .  * 

Secondly,  this  common  nature  of  men  and  animals  held 
a  further  consequence.  Men  were  grouped  in  clans, 
unions  of  kindred,  of  sharers  in  a  common  blood.  Within 
the  clan  alone  its  members  found  friendship  and  protec- 
tion, and  the  stranger  was  normally  an  enemy.  If  then 
you  would  form  any  friendly  relation  with  a  man  not 
by  birth  your  kinsman,  he  must  first  become  one.  You 
two  are  not  of  the  same  blood,  but  your  blood  can  be  made 
to  intermingle  as  it  flows  from  your  opened  veins,  and  this 

'As  late  as  1862  Mr.  Baring-Gould  found  it  impossible  to  procure  a 
guide  across  a  wild  tract  of  country  in  France  which  was  haunted  by  a 
loup-garou  (Tylor:  Primitive  Culture,  i,  314).  About  the  same  time  there 
was  living  in  Kirchhain,  Germany,  a  woman  who  was  known  to  have 
changed  herself  into  a  wolf  and  scratched  and  torn  a  girl  going  through 
the  fields  (Jevons:  Introduction  to  the  History  of  Religion,  16). 


198  Catholicism 

blood-covenant  is  a  sacred  bond  of  brotherhood,  not  only 
between  you  two,  but  extending  to  your  clans ;  your  brother 
is  the  brother  of  all  your  brethren,  the  blood  of  either  party 
to  this  transaction  is  the  blood  of  all  his  kin.  It  was  in- 
evitable that  man,  who  imagined  that  all  things  felt  and 
acted  like  himself,  should  imagine  that  other  beings  were 
organised  in  societies  on  the  plan  of  that  into  which  he 
himself  was  born;  and  the  resemblance  was  obvious  between 
the  various  species  of  animals  and  plants  and  the  kins  or 
clans  of  human  society.  It  followed  naturally  that  a 
clan  might  seek  to  form  alliance  with  one  of  these  animal 
kinds  on  the  same  principle  as  with  a  human  kin.  In 
his  struggle  for  existence  man  had  learned  his  inferiority 
to  certain  animals  in  one  or  another  respect,  and  some 
had  impressed  him  with  a  sense  of  their  strange  power. 
"Omne  ignotum  pro  mirifico":  their  nature  being  imper- 
fectly known,  animals  were  supposed  to  possess  sundry 
marvellous  attributes,  and  their  counsel  and  guidance 
were  sought  in  important  affairs,  for  to  the  primitive  mind 
' '  omens  are  not  blind  tokens :  the  animals  know  what  they 
tell  to  men."1  Naturally  in  their  choice  of  an  ally  the 
clan  would  look  for  the  kind  which  their  imagination  most 
readily  gifted  with  superhuman  powers,  and  so  an  animal 
species  having  a  natural  affinity  with  men,  yet  conceived 
as  superhuman — this  became  the  Totem,  or  rather  that 
divine  kinsman  was  the  soul  incarnate  in  the  species.  As 
far  back  as  we  can  trace  the  clan  this  alliance  is  found 
existing;  the  men  are  of  one  blood  with  the  animal  species, 
individuals  of  the  species  are  their  fellow  clansmen  and 
they  are  members  of  the  animal  clan.  Later  on  the  origin 
of  the  blood-relationship  is  lost  sight  of  and  it  is  explained 
by  a  myth  telling  how  both  kins  are  descended  from  a 
common  ancestor,  and  this  ancestor  is  universally  believed 
to  have  been  animal,  not  human.  By  kinship,  then, 
1  W.  Robertson  Smith,  The  Religion  of  the  Semites,  443. 


Catholicism  199 

whether  natural  or  artificial,  the  clan  is  related  to  the 
divine,  and  hence  its  members  are  united  not  only  by  blood 
but  by  religion;  and  the  earliest  form  of  society  is  a 
religious  community.  The  god  of  the  religion  is  a  kindred 
and  friendly  power  under  whose  protection  men  breathe 
more  freely,  shielded  against  assault  from  the  vague 
unknown ;  so  far  from  true  is  it  that  religion  is  the  child  of 
terror.  "It  is  not  with  the  fear  of  unknown  powers, 
but  with  a  loving  reverence  for  known  gods  who  are  knit 
to  their  worshippers  by  strong  bonds  of  kinship  that 
religion  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word  begins."1  This 
elementary  religion  was  the  feeling  of  a  living  relation 
with  the  divine  helper  and  defender  of  the  clan  who  claimed 
its  affectionate  loyalty,  and  hence  it  is  that  sacrifice,  the 
worship  of  this  religion,  is  not  in  its  original  intention  the 
offering  of  a  gift,  nor  the  paying  of  a  tribute,  nor  an  act 
of  abnegation,  nor  an  effort  at  propitiation;  it  is  a  means 
of  communion  with  the  god.  Its  purpose  was  to  refresh 
and  renew  the  life-bond  between  the  clansmen  and  their 
god  which,  as  physically  constituted,  tended  to  weaken 
under  lapse  of  time.2  The  procedure  to  be  adopted  was 
obvious  to  primitive  men:  a  totem  animal  must  be  killed 
and  eaten.  As  the  clan  is  a  physical  unity,  one  flesh  and 
one  blood,  so  the  flesh  and  blood  of  every  totem  animal 
is  that  of  the  species.  And  since  this  is  the  seat  of  the 
life  or  soul,  in  the  flesh,  and  especially  in  the  blood,  of 
the  divine  and  kindred  animal  the  god,  as  the  soul  of  the 
species,  resides.  That  is  to  say,  it  is  as  god,  not  as  animal, 

1  W.  Robertson  Smith,  op.  tit.,  54. 

aThe  above  holds  of  the  stated  annual  sacrifice;  special  exigencies 
called  for  special  sacrifices,  when  for  instance  pestilence  which  betokened 
the  presence  of  evil  spirits,  or  war  which  involved  encounter  with  a  hostile 
god  as  well  as  with  a  human  foe,  impelled  the  clan  to  summon  its  supernatural 
ally  to  its  need.  Among  many  savages  war  is  still  regarded  as  a  quasi- 
religious  function  for  which  preparation  must  be  made  by  fasting  and  purifi- 
cation and  other  rites  and  ceremonies. 


200  Catholicism 

that  the  totem  furnishes  the  sacramental  meal,  and  hence 
in  partaking  of  it  the  worshippers  are  partakers  of  the 
divine  life  and  their  union  with  the  god  is  cemented  and 
confirmed.  The  most  primitive  form  of  sacrifice  appears 
to  have  survived  in  the  practice  of  the  Arabs  of  the  Sinaitic 
desert  as  described  by  Nilus  toward  the  close  of  the  fourth 
century.  Robertson  Smith  gives  an  account  of  it  in  these 
words  : 

The  camel  chosen  as  the  victim  is  bound  upon  a  rude  altar 
of  stones  piled  together,  and  when  the  leader  of  the  band 
has  thrice  led  the  worshippers  round  the  altar  in  solemn 
procession  accompanied  with  chants,  he  inflicts  the  first  wound 
while  the  last  words  of  the  hymn  are  still  upon  the  lips  of 
the  congregation,  and  in  all  haste  drinks  of  the  blood  that 
gushes  forth.  Forthwith  the  whole  company  fall  on  the  victim 
with  their  swords,  hacking  off  pieces  of  the  quivering  flesh 
and  devouring  them  raw  with  such  wild  haste  that  in  the 
short  interval  between  the  rise  of  the  day  star  which  marked 
the  hour  for  the  service  to  begin  and  the  disappearance  of  its 
rays  before  the  rising  sun,  the  entire  camel,  body  and  bones, 
skin,  blood,  and  entrails,  is  wholly  devoured. 

According  to  Dr.  Bastian  (Der  Mensch,  iii,  154)  the 
ancient  Prussians  retained  the  essential  features  of  the 
primitive  rite,  though  without  its  more  revolting  details, 
and  the  wild  rush  to  cut  gobbets  of  flesh  from  the  living 
victim  had  given  way  to  an  orderly  apportionment  of  the 
sacrificial  meal  among  the  worshippers.  The  essential 
features  in  question  are,  first,  an  altar,  a  heap  of  stones, 
the  original  purpose  of  which  was  simply  to  receive  the 
blood  of  the  victim,  which  must  not  be  spilled  upon  the 
ground,  for  that  was  in  the  highest  degree  taboo. x  Next, 

1  Nilus  tells  us  that  only  the  sacrificers  drank  of  the  blood,  which  was 
deemed  of  too  high  a  sanctity  to  be  given  to  the  congregation — a  view 
which  seems  to  have  been  adopted  by  the  Catholic  Church  in  later  days . 


Catholicism  201 

the  victim  must  be  wholly  consumed  on  the  spot  where 
the  sacrifice  takes  place,  and  all  present — in  primitive 
usage  the  whole  clan — must  be  partakers  of  the  sacrificial 
meal.  Finally,  they  must  prepare  for  it  by  fasting,  for 
ordinary  food  is  forbidden  to  those  about  to  participate 
of  the  sacred  flesh,  and  for  further  precaution  against  the 
"uncleanness"  which  one  might  inadvertently  acquire 
in  the  chance  happenings  of  the  day,  the  sacrifice  must  be 
at  night,  or  early  morning,  and  all  be  over  before  the 
rising  of  the  sun.  It  appears  then  that  in  its  primitive 
conception  sacrifice  is  the  eating  of  the  god,  and  by  this 
men  entered  into  union  with  the  divine  being  who  swayed 
the  fates  and  fortunes  of  the  clan.  At  first  it  was  required 
under  heavy  penalty  that  the  totem  animal  be  devoured 
in  its  entirety.  When  under  advancing  refinement  the 
practice  of  consuming  the  bones,  skin,  and  entrails  was 
discarded,  these  remnants  of  the  meal  were  disposed 
of  among  some  tribes  by  burial,  but  more  commonly 
by  burning — whence,  says  Dr.  Jevons,  our  word  "bon- 
fire," from  bone-fire — and  such  destruction  was  con- 
sidered an  equivalent  for  the  earlier  practice,  which  was 
based  on  the  idea  that  it  was  sacrilege  to  leave  anything 
of  the  sacred  victim  unconsumed. 

In  its  long  development  through  changing  time  sacrifice 
took  on  new  meanings  and  came  to  express  a  succession 
of  ideas  other  than  that  in  which  it  took  its  rise.  Thus 
the  eating  oj  the  god  passed  into  eating  with  the  god. 
Since  eating  sustains  life,  all  eating  together  of  a  common 
food  is  in  primitive  thought  a  bond  to  unite  the  lives  of 
men,  a  symbol  and  confirmation  of  fellowship  and  mutual 
social  obligation. x  And  so  the  kinsmen  and  their  kindred 

1  For  the  bond  of  salt,  or  milk,  the  law  of  hospitality,  etc.,  and  the  ideas 
underlying  them,  see  Robertson  Smith,  op.  cit.t  269  sq.  In  the  days  of  the 
clan  men  would  not  eat  together  at  all  unless  they  were  united  by  kinship, 
or  by  a  covenant  which  had  the  same  effect  as  kinship.  This  idea  appears 


202  Catholicism 

god  became  commensals,  and  communion  between  them 
was  maintained  by  their  joint  participation  in  the  flesh 
and  blood  of  the  sacrifice,  the  latter  being  the  portion  of 
the  god  (Ps.  1,  13).  Later  on,  when  the  idea  of  property 
has  taken  rise,  sacrifice  becomes  an  offering  to  the  god.  In 
agricultural  times  the  deity  is  conceived  as  king  of  his 
people  and  lord  of  the  land  which  he  makes  to  yield  the 
crops,  and  as  such  he  is  to  be  approached  with  gifts  or 
tribute  of  cereals,  fruits,  and  cattle.  Still  later  the  growth 
of  ethical  consciousness  leads  to  the  notion  of  sacrifice 
as  an  atoning  offering  for  sin,  or  in  time  of  calamity  a 
propitiation  to  avert  the  wrath  of  the  offended  god. 
Throughout  all  changes,  however,  and  overlaid  though 
it  came  to  be  by  other  associations,  the  original  idea  of 
sacrifice  as  a  means  of  communion  with  a  divine  life  held  a 
persistent  predominance  in  the  minds  of  men.  That 
among  the  Hebrews  the  flesh  of  the  sin-offering  was  eaten 
by  the  priests  in  the  holy  place  witnesses  to  the  retention 
of  the  old  principle  of  sacrificial  communion,  only  the 
communion  is  restricted  to  the  priests  as  representatives 
of  the  sinful  people.  In  fact  all  atoning  sacrifice  rests  on 
the  idea  of  communion,  for  it  is  simply  an  act  to  retie  the 
bond  of  union  with  the  alienated  god  and  wipe  out  the 
memory  of  estrangement. 

The  transition  from  totemism  to  a  worship  of  anthro- 
pomorphic divinities  is  most  clearly  traceable  in  Egypt. 
It  begins  in  the  selection  of  one  individual  of  the  animal 
species  as  the  one  the  deity  has  chosen  to  abide  in;  as, 
for  instance,  the  calf  marked  by  the  peculiar  signs  which 
showed  it  to  be  the  manifestation  of  the  Calf-god,  Apis. 

in  Genesis  xliii,  32,  and  its  survival  in  New  Testament  times.  "He  eateth 
with  sinners"  was  the  grave  charge  against  Jesus,  and  Peter  at  Antioch 
was  constrained  to  give  up  eating  with  the  Gentiles.  Today  in  Russia  a 
man's  life  is  sacred,  though  he  be  an  enemy  or  a  criminal,  if  he  has  partaken 
of  your  bread  and  salt.  Cf.  H.  C.  Trumbull,  The  Covenant  of  Salt. 


Catholicism  203 

Then  follows  the  gradual  dissociation  of  the  god  from 
his  animal  form  and  his  appearance  in  human  shape. 
At  first  in  districts  where  a  certain  animal  has  been  ven- 
erated the  god  is  represented  as  a  man  with  the  head  of 
that  animal.  Then  finally  the  god  casts  off  all  semblance 
of  the  animal,  and  henceforth  this  is  simply  regarded  as 
being  sacred  to  him.  This  is  the  position  reached  by  the 
Greek  polytheism  of  historic  times  where  every  god  and 
goddess  has  a  sacred  animal  or  plant  " associated"  with 
him  or  her  in  ritual  and  in  art,  as  the  hind  with  Artemis 
and  the  laurel  with  Apollo.  Such  association  points 
to  an  origin  in  totemism,  but  that  the  ancestors  of  the 
Greeks  were  totemists  is  not  dependent  on  this  inference. 
Leading  scholars  are  agreed  that  all  peoples  on  a  "natural 
basis  of  subsistence"  are  totemists.  It  has  been  main- 
tained, and  the  point  is  of  interest,  that  only  through  to- 
temism could  be  effected  the  domestication  of  plants  and 
animals  which  leads  to  the  civilisation  that  proves  fatal 
to  totemism,  and  hence  "the  mere  fact  that  a  people 
possesses  material  civilisation  requires  us  to  believe 
that  in  a  state  of  savagery  it  was  totemist."1 

In  totemism  religion  begins,  as  morality  takes  rise  in 
the  taboo — the  flat  positive  prohibition  for  which  no 
reason  or  explanation  is  offered.  In  these  are  the  roots 
of  human  society ;  the  words  are  American  and  Polynesian, 
but  the  institutions  are  world-wide,  and  there  is  no  race 
but  has  passed  through  the  stage  of  the  totem  and  the 
taboo. 2 

The  worship  of  the  spirit  of  an  animal  species  is  probably 
the  earlier  form  of  totemism,  but  trees  and  plants  believed 
to  exercise  power  over  the  fortunes  of  men  were  taken  for 
totems  as  well,  and  as  there  were  clans  named  from  an 

1  Jevons,  op.  tit.,  127. 

aFor  survivals  of  totemism  and  the  taboo  among  the  Israelites  see 
Reinach,  Orpheus:  A  General  History  of  Religions,  178-183. 


204  Catholicism 

animal  totem,  so  there  were  clans  of  the  tamarind  or  the 
palm.  Tree  worship  forms  a  curious  and  interesting 
chapter  in  the  history  of  religion,  but  it  is  one  that  lies 
apart  from  the  subject  of  our  consideration.  We  may 
note  in  passing  certain  survivals  that  appear  in  recent 
times.  Since  the  tree  totem  was  present  not  only  in  the 
tree  but  in  every  branch  of  it,  ''presumably  the  god  was 
originally  present  in  the  switch  of  rowan  with  which  the 
Scottish  milkmaid  protects  her  cattle  from  evil  spirits."1 
When  we  see,  as  may  frequently  be  seen,  a  sapling  set 
up  on  top  of  a  house  in  course  of  construction,  "for  luck," 
as  men  say,  we  see  an  unconscious  reproduction  of  a 
religious  observance  of  our  primitive  ancestors  who 
planted  a  tree  at  the  door  of  the  tent,  or  fastened  a  branch 
on  the  roof  of  the  hut,  to  secure  the  protecting  presence 
of  their  god.  The  dance  around  the  Maypole,  a  custom 
that  formerly  prevailed  in  rural  England,  is  a  direct 
descendant  from  the  rites  in  honor  of  the  tutelary  genius 
of  the  Teutonic  village  community.  In  one  of  his  Twice 
Told  Tales  Hawthorne  tells  of  a  real  marriage  at  the  May- 
pole of  Merrymount,  and  this  accords  with  the  primitive 
usage  that  a  marriage  ceremony  must  be  in  presence  of 
the  tree-god,  and  follow  certain  procedures  to  invoke 
his  favor.  In  some  cases  the  couple  were  married  first  to 
trees  and  then  to  each  other. 

Far  more  important  to  the  study  of  the  derivation  of 
sacramentalism  is  the  cult  of  cereals  and  food-plants 
which  arose  in  the  era  of  their  cultivation.  It  followed 
on  the  lines  of  the  old  ideas.  As  the  tree- totem  resided 
in  the  branch,  so  any  sheaf  of  grain  contained  the  vegeta- 
tion spirit,  and  if  preserved  in  the  house  would  bring  it 
under  the  divine  protection  during  the  interval  between 
autumn  and  spring,  when  there  was  no  plant  life  in  the 
fields.  As  animal  totemism  developed  toward  anthropo- 

1  Jevons,  op.  cit.t  209. 


Catholicism  205 

morphic  conceptions,  so  gradually  the  immanent  plant- 
god  was  taken  to  have  a  human  shape,  and  it  became  the 
custom  to  make  the  ears  of  grain  into  the  rude  form  of 
a  female  doll,  clothed  in  a  rich  garment  and  called  the 
Corn  Maiden,  or  Corn  Mother,  according  to  the  seasons  of 
seed-time  or  harvest.  This  stage  of  advance  compares 
with  the  half  human,  half  animal  shape  of  the  totem  god 
in  Egypt.  Next,  the  goddess  is  represented  in  purely 
human  form,  but  her  name,  her  attributes  and  functions 
show  that  her  connection  with  the  plant  is  maintained. 
Finally,  it  is  forgotten  that  she  was  originally  a  plant, 
and  of  such  origin  there  is  only  a  survival  in  association, 
as  when  Chicomecoatl  carries  maize-stalks  in  her  hands 
and  Demeter  wears  a  garland  of  wheat,  and  cereals  are 
the  offerings  to  both.  We  find  that  the  cereal  divinity  is 
commonly  a  goddess,  and  this  seems  to  be  owing  to  the 
fact  that  horticulture,  which  preceded  agriculture,  was 
the  province  of  the  women. 

The  development  of  the  sacramental  meal  in  plant 
worship  follows  that  of  the  conception  of  the  totem  god. 
In  the  primitive  period  there  is  a  solemn  annual  meal  at 
which  all  members  of  the  community  must  eat  of  the 
seeds  or  fruits,  and  of  which  no  fragments  must  be  left. 
Next,  this  eating  of  the  god  changes  to  eating  with  the 
god,  and  the  divine  clansman  is  invited  to  partake  of  the 
first  fruits  of  the  new  crop,  which  at  a  later  day  will  be 
offered  to  him,  or  her,  as  gift  or  tribute.  Then  when  the 
time  comes  for  the  cereal  totem  to  be  regarded  as  a  spirit 
which,  if  seen,  would  appear  in  human  form,  it  is  repre- 
sented by  a  dough  image  fashioned  in  human  shape.  Such 
an  image  of  Chicomecoatl  is  described  by  the  Spanish 
missionary,  Father  Acosta,  and  among  the  Teutons  a 
dough  doll  was  made  in  the  shape  of  a  little  girl  and  dis- 
tributed in  portions  to  be  eaten  by  the  congregation. 
Frequently  we  find  a  mingling  of  tree  worship  with  that 


206  Catholicism 

of  the  cereal  divinity,  as  where  in  certain  Gallic  tribes 
a  fir  tree  was  planted  on  the  last  load  of  grain  and  a  man 
of  dough  fastened  to  its  top,  which  was  eaten  by  the  as- 
sembled people.  In  Peru  a  tree  was  felled,  cleared  of  its 
branches,  and  set  up  with  a  paste  figure  of  the  god  on  top, 
which  was  brought  to  the  ground  by  the  arrows  of  the 
worshippers,  a  procedure  analogous  to  the  solemn  slaughter 
of  the  animal  totem.  This  early  rite  of  sacrifice  is  also 
found  in  Mexico,  where  once  a  year  a  paste  idol  of  the  god 
was  made  and  the  priest  hurled  a  dart  into  its  breast; 
this  was  called  "killing  the  god  so  that  his  body  might 
be  eaten."  Father  Acosta  gives  a  vivid  description  of  the 
ceremonies  on  this  occasion,  closing  as  follows : 

Then  the  priests  gave  these  consecrated  pieces  to  the 
people  in  manner  of  a  communion,  who  received  it  with  such 
tears,  fear,  and  reverence  as  it  were  an  admirable  thing,  saying 
they  did  eat  the  flesh  and  bones  of  God,  and  such  as  had  any 
sick  folk  demanded  thereof  for  them  and  carried  it  away  with 
great  reverence  and  veneration.1 

In  the  final  stage  of  this  development  the  representative 
character  of  dough  or  paste  has  become  so  firmly  estab- 
lished that  it  is  no  longer  felt  necessary  to  fashion  it  into 
an  image  of  the  deity.  In  Peru  morsels  of  maize  loaves, 
mingled  with  the  blood  of  white  sheep,  were  handed  to  the 
communicants,  which  "all  took  with  such  care  that  no 
particle  was  allowed  to  fall  to  the  ground,  this  being  looked 
upon  as  a  great  sin."  Father  Acosta  witnessed  this 
" communion"  with  the  sun-god,  though  he  doubts  "if 
it  be  lawful  to  use  this  word  in  so  devilish  a  matter." 
This  case  is  an  instance  of  the  spread  of  cereal  rites  to  the 
worship  of  non-cereal  divinities,  together  with  the  appro- 
priation of  an  important  element  in  the  ritual  of  animal 

1  Acosta — Grimston's  translation  in  the  Hakluyt  Society's  edition — 
quoted  by  Jevons,  op.  tit.,  217 


Catholicism  207 

sacrifice.  Commonly  however  the  juice  of  fruits,  or 
wine — "the  blood  of  the  grape" — became  the  substitute 
for  the  blood  of  sacrifice,  as  bread — or  among  the  Mayas 
consecrated  wafers — had  taken  the  place  of  the  flesh  of 
the  animal  victim. 

With  this  we  arrive  at  the  sacramental  elements  which 
have  maintained  their  standing  down  to  the  present  day. 
Father  Grueber  was  properly  shocked  at  witnessing  the 
use  of  them  among  the  Tatars : 

This  only  do  I  affirm  [he  writes],  that  the  Devil  so  mimics 
the  Catholic  Church  in  these  parts  that  although  no  European 
or  Christian  has  ever  been  there,  still  in  all  essential  things 
they  agree  so  completely  with  the  Roman  Church  as  even  to 
celebrate  the  sacrifice  of  the  Host  with  bread  and  wine ;  with 
mine  own  eyes  have  I  seen  it.1 

Let  us  note  the  significance  of  this  inadvertent  confes- 
sion. It  has  been  said  that ' '  there  is  not  a  rite  or  ceremony 
still  practiced  and  revered  among  us  that  is  not  the  lineal 
descendant  of  barbaric  thought  and  usage"2;  and  in  a 
more  literal  sense  than  he  intended  Augustine's  words  hold 
good:  "That  which  is  now  called  the  Christian  religion 
existed  among  the  ancients,  and  in  fact  was  with  the  hu- 
man race  from  the  beginning."3  It  is  indeed  no  discredit 
to  a  religious  institution  that  it  derives  from  a  humble 
origin,  for  that  cannot  be  more  humble  than  man's  own. 

1  Thevenot,  Divers  Voyages,  iv — quoted  in  Jevons,  op.  cit.,  219. 

a  Clodd,  Myths  and  Dreams,  168. 

s  "Those  who  find  the  exposition  of  pagan  elements  in  the  essence  of 
Christianity  repugnant  to  their  sentiment  are  inclined  to  accept  the  dictum 
that  'origin  does  not  affect  validity.'  I  imagine  the  facts  of  religious  psy- 
chology make  somewhat  against  the  aphorism.  At  all  events,  in  the 
history  of  creeds  validity  has  been  very  often  found  to  maintain  itself 
mainly  by  an  appeal  to  origin;  and  as  comparative  religion  is  much  con- 
cerned with  origins,  it  is  indirectly  concerned  with  those  claims  of  validity 
that  support  themselves  by  such  an  appeal."  Farnell,  The  Evolution  of 
Religion,  85. 


208  Catholicism 

All  things  come  of  low  beginning:  but  they  must  come. 
If  the  outcome  of  a  thing  is  the  truth  of  it,  if  its  true  char- 
acter only  appears  in  its  complete  development,  then  the 
development  must  reach  completion.  Man  is  not  man 
until  he  rises  from  the  brute  through  the  savage  and  the 
barbarian  to  civilisation,  throwing  off  and  leaving  behind 
him  the  characteristics  of  the  stages  he  has  passed  through. 
So  with  regard  to  religious  ideas  and  forms  of  worship: 
the  question  is  not  what  they  were,  but  what  they  are. 
Are  they  perpetuations  of  early  belief  and  usage,  or  are 
they  a  higher  outgrowth  which  has  emerged  from  these 
and  discarded  them?  Are  they  adequate  expressions 
of  the  modern  man's  enlightened  thought  and  finer 
feeling,  or  are  they  survivals  of  the  thought  and  feeling 
of  a  lower  plane  of  life  which  as  concerns  all  secular  affairs 
he  has  long  forgotten?  Browning  gives  us  the  sentiment 
of  the  Renaissance  time  when  the  bishop  gives  order  for 
his  tomb,  whence  he  may 

"Hear  the  blessed  mutter  of  the  mass, 
And  see  God  made  and  eaten  every  day." 

And  a  modern  instance  witnesses  to  the  survival  of  the 
totemistic  idea  in  our  day.  When  the  Eucharistic  Con- 
gress was  held  in  London  in  1908,  the  Prime  Minister,  in 
deference  to  an  obsolete  statute,  or  to  the  outcry  of  intoler- 
ance, objected  to  the  bearing  of  the  Host  in  procession 
through  the  public  streets,  one  of  the  ceremonies  on  the  pro- 
gramme of  the  Congress.  The  English  Archbishop  an- 
nounced to  a  Catholic  mass  meeting  this  interference  of  the 
government,  and  added :  ' '  Though  not  permitted  to  carry 
our  Divine  Master  with  us,  I  trust  that  all  present  will  by 
the  fervor  of  their  singing  make  Westminster  one  great 
sanctuary  of  the  Blessed  Sacrament."1  A  fetish  is 
1  New  York  Times,  September  13,  1908. 


Catholicism  209 

defined  as  any  material  object  into  which  by  means  of 
invocations  or  incantations  a  spirit  has  been  induced  to 
enter,  in  order  that  one  may  receive  from  it  supernatural 
aid  or  benefit.  It  is  a  definition  that  seems  to  fit  with 
exactness  the  consecrated  elements  of  the  Mass. 

The  intent  of  the  sacrificial  meal  was  to  bring  men  into 
union  with  their  god — a  literal  corporeal  union  effected 
by  the  eating  of  the  animal  or  plant  which  was  believed 
to  be  an  incarnation  of  the  Divine.  The  practice  accorded 
with  the  notions  and  sentiments  of  early  men  and  responded 
to  their  religious  needs,  and  in  its  day  it  served  its  purpose. 
But  the  time  came  when  the  ritual  of  sacrifice,  even  though 
it  had  outgrown  the  crudity  of  its  primitive  conception, 
would  no  longer  satisfy  a  deeper  and  clearer-sighted  re- 
ligious feeling,  and  earnest  reformers  denounced  it  as  un- 
worthy of  the  deity  and  demoralising  to  the  worshippers. 
The  Hebrew  prophets  attacked  the  sacrificial  worship  in 
its  principle — the  materialism,  the  externalism  which  sought 
communion  with  the  Divine  through  ceremonial  rites. 
The  ritual  of  the  sanctuaries  had  borrowed  much  from 
the  surrounding  heathenism,  but  the  prophetic  protest 
was  not  directed  against  its  heathenish  character  but 
against  ritualism  as  such,  and  in  place  of  communion 
through  an  external  mediation  they  insisted  on  inward 
immediate  communion  in  the  conscience  and  the  heart. 
This  "Gospel  before  Christ"  was  of  a  nature  too  spiritual 
to  win  the  mind  of  the  people,  its  preachers  were  forcibly 
silenced  by  the  priestly  partisans  of  religious  conservatism, 
and  animal  sacrifice  still  held  its  old  place  in  Jewish  wor- 
ship in  the  day  of  the  Prophet  of  Nazareth,  eight  centuries 
after  the  abortive  attempt  at  reform. 

The  sixth  century  B.C.  brought  with  it  an  innovation 
in  religion  nothing  less  than  revolutionary.1  Hitherto 
religion  had  meant  the  relation  to  the  Divine  maintained 

1  Cf.  Jevons,  op.  cit.,  ch.  xxiii. 
14 


210  Catholicism 

by  the  clan,  the  tribe,  the  civic  community.  For  when 
the  city-state  arose  from  the  fusion  of  tribes  and  their 
settlement  in  one  local  habitation,  religion  was  still  an 
affair  of  the  State,  and  the  individual's  religion  was  one 
with  his  citizenship,  was  given  in  his  membership  in  the 
religio-political  society.  The  innovation  was  the  rise 
of  private  religious  associations,  with  new  cults  and  rites, 
in  which  membership  was  voluntary  and  open  to  all,  and 
so  now  for  the  first  time  a  man  could  belong  to  a  religious 
community  which  was  distinct  from  the  State.  A  choice 
between  the  worship  to  which  he  was  born  and  another 
was  offered  him,  and  the  exercise  of  this  freedom  of  choice 
was  the  first  step  toward  consciousness  of  religion  as  a 
personal  relation  of  the  soul  to  its  god.  The  new  move- 
ment originated  in  the  East,  where  a  series  of  political 
disasters  had  shaken  the  faith  of  many  peoples  in  their 
national  gods,  and  a  sense  of  need  led  them  to  seek  a 
closer  union  with  those  gods,  or  with  others  more  powerful. 
This  impulse  tended  to  the  discarding  of  the  gift  or  the 
tribute  theory  of  sacrifice  which  prevailed  in  the  official 
worship  and  a  reversion  to  the  primitive  conception  of  it 
as  a  communion.  The  wave  of  religious  revivalism 
gradually  spread  from  Semitic  lands  into  the  Greek  world, 
where  it  not  only  gave  rise  to  the  Dionysiac  worship, 
the  Orphic  and  Pythagorean  schools,  and  the  Eleusinian 
Mysteries,  but  led  to  the  adoption  and  naturalisation  of 
the  Oriental  cults  which  were  pouring  in  like  a  flood  over 
all  the  West,  bringing  with  them  the  mythical  ideas  and 
ritual  practices  which  had  come  down  from  the  ancient 
past.  When  Christianity  made  its  appearance  in  the 
Empire  the  worship  of  Attis  and  Adonis,  of  Cybele,  Isis, 
and  Mithra,  and  many  another,  contended  for  popular 
acceptance,  for  they  too,  in  common  with  Christianity, 
possessed  the  attraction  of  an  appeal  to  the  individual; 
they,  too  claimed  the  wife  apart  from  her  husband,  the 


Catholicism  211 

slave  apart  from  his  master.1  Their  votaries  travelled 
through  the  cities,  setting  up  new  shrines  and  calling 
upon  each  and  all  to  enter  into  communion  with  their 
saving  deity.  The  gloom  or  splendor  of  their  Mysteries 
fascinated  the  imagination,  and  their  priests  and  acolytes 
made  hosts  of  eager  converts,  until  it  seemed  as  if  the 
conquered  East  was  setting  forth  in  turn  for  the  religious 
conquest  of  the  world. 

It  was  in  face  of  these  entrenched  forces,  and  on  terri- 
tory held  in  adverse  possession,  that  Christianity  strove 
to  establish  itself,  and  to  this  end  it  was  obliged  to  be  all 
things  to  all  men  and  to  take  into  itself  much  of  the  old 
heathenism  which  it  found  impossible  wholly  to  reject. 
The  situation  was  in  effect  the  one  described  by  Robertson 
Smith  (Religion  o)  the  Semites,  2) : 

The  positive  Semitic  religions  had  to  establish  themselves 
on  ground  already  occupied  by  older  beliefs  and  usages;  they 
had  to  assimilate  what  they  could  not  displace,  and  whether 
they  rejected  or  absorbed  the  elements  of  the  older  religions, 
they  had  at  every  point  to  reckon  with  them.  No  positive 
religion  that  has  moved  men  has  been  able  to  start  with  a 
tabula  rasa  and  express  itself  as  if  religion  were  beginning  for 
the  first  time;  in  form,  if  not  also  in  substance,  the  new  system 
must  be  in  contact  all  along  the  line  with  the  older  ideas  and 
practices  which  it  finds  in  possession.  A  new  scheme  of  faith 
can  find  a  hearing  only  by  appealing  to  religious  instincts 
and  susceptibilities  that  already  exist  in  its  audience,  and  it 
cannot  reach  these  without  taking  account  of  the  traditional 
forms  in  which  religious  feeling  is  embodied,  and  without 
speaking  a  language  which  men  accustomed  to  these  old 
forms  can  understand.2 

1  For  these  cults  see  Dill's  Roman  Society  from  Nero  to  Marcus  Aurelius, 
and  Eraser's  learned  work,  The  Golden  Bough,  part  iv. 

a  To  a  similar  effect  writes  A.  Sabatier  (Esquisse  d'une  Philosophic  de  la 
Religion,  208):  "La  s6mence  Chre'tienne  n'est  jamais  seme"e  dans  une 
terrain  neutre  et  vacant.  La  place  est  toujours  occupe'e  par  des  traditions 


212  Catholicism 

At  the  outset  Baptism  and  the  Lord's  Supper  were  not 
regarded  as  sacraments,  nor  were  they  practices  essentially 
distinctive  of  the  Christian  community.  Baptism  was  the 
same  symbolical  act  of  purification  as  that  of  John's  disci- 
ples, except  for  the  acknowledgment  of  Jesus,  and  the 
Love  Feast  differed  from  the  common  meal  of  the  many 
and  various  associations,  religious  and  secular,  of  the 
Greco-Roman  world  only  in  so  far  as  their  faith  in  Jesus 
was  felt  to  be  the  bond  of  the  brotherly  fellowship  of  the 
believers.  The  sacramental  significance  ascribed  to  these 
simple  usages  takes  rise  in  the  mystical  teaching  of  Paul. 
At  first  the  prayer  offered  at  the  Supper  was  simply  a 
11  grace"  or  thanksgiving  for  God's  bounties,  and  hence 
the  Agape  came  to  be  called  the  Eucharist.  Then  it 
received  from  Paul  the  added  significance  of  a  memorial  of 
the  Lord's  last  supper  with  his  disciples,  and  finally  a 
third  meaning,  foreign  to  the  mind  of  the  first  Christians, 
by  which  it  was  closely  related  to  the  rites  of  the  Pagan 
Mysteries.  For  the  sacramental  idea  once  conceived, 
or  adopted,  its  mode  of  expression  was  inevitably  shaped 
by  the  influence  of  beliefs  and  ritual  usages  familiar  to  the 
Gentile  converts.1  As  the  worshippers  of  Attis  or  of 
Mithra  sought  communion  with  the  divine  life  in  their 
sacramental  meal  of  consecrated  bread  and  wine,  or  wine 
mingled  with  water,  so  the  life  of  the  Pauline  community, 

anterieures  d'id£es,  de  rites  ou  de  coutumes,  par  des  institutions  qui  ont 
fait  souche  et  ont  possession  d'6tat.  Le  Christianisme  ne  peut  done 
s'enraciner  nulle  part  sans  entrer  en  conflit  avec  les  puissances  r6gnantes, 
sans  livrer  battaille  &  des  pre'juge's,  a  des  moeurs  et  £  des  superstitions  qui 
naturellement  resistent  et,  m&ne  vaincus,  renaissent  sous  d'autres  formes 
dans  la  religion  victorieuse." 

1  "Unless  the  ideas  of  initiatory  ceremonies  as  the  portal  of  a  religious 
society,  and  of  the  sacrifice  of  communion  as  a  means  of  union  with  a 
saving  deity,  had  already  been  widely  spread — especially  in  Asia  Minor 
and  Syria,  the  countries  of  the  earliest  Christian  propaganda — the  history 
of  the  Christian  sacraments  would  have  been  very  different  from  what  it 
was."  Gardner,  The  Growth  of  Christianity,  133. 


Catholicism  213 

"the  body  of  Christ,"  was  sustained  by  the  like  mystic 
sacrament.1  This  analogy  with  heathen  rites  of  worship, 
which  Paul  himself  drew  (I  Cor.  x,  16-21),  is  one  that 
holds  throughout  in  his  teaching  concerning  the  sacra- 
ments, and  it  cannot  be  explained  as  a  chance  coincidence. 
Evidence  abounds  to  show  the  accord  of  Christian  and 
heathen  thought  on  this  subject  in  later  times.  Thus 
Firmicus  Maternus  warns  the  postulant  for  initiation  in 
the  Mysteries  of  Cybele  that  he  is  about  to  eat  poison 
and  drink  of  the  cup  of  death.  Food  of  another  kind 
it  is  that  confers  salvation  and  immortal  life,  and  the 
misguided  heathen  is  exhorted  to  seek  the  bread  and  cup 
of  Christ.2  That  is,  the  sacramental  principle  is  in  both 
cases  the  same.  The  mistake  of  the  votary  of  Cybele 
is  not  in  the  attempt  to  satisfy  spiritual  needs  by  means 
of  liturgical  rites,  but  in  choosing  the  wrong  rites.  To  a 
similar  effect  are  the  words  of  Cyril  of  Jerusalem  that  just 
as  meats,  simple  in  their  nature,  are  polluted  by  the 
invocation  of  idols,  so  the  simple  water  of  baptism  by 
invocation  of  Father,  Son,  and  Spirit  acquires  a  power  of 
holiness.  Such  language  expressed  the  trend  of  popular 
sentiment.  From  the  opening  of  the  second  century 
"the  growth  of  Mysteries  was  proceeding  vigorously  in 
both  Christian  and  pagan  circles,  and  Christian  rites  were 
rapidly  becoming  a  celebration  of  mysteries."3 

Christian   baptism  was  baptism   "into   the  name   of 

1  Pfleiderer  writes  of  the  Mithra  worship:    "At  one  side  stand  the  initi- 
ated, in  animal  masks  which  represent  the  being  of  the  god  under  various 
attributes;  thus  they  have  'put  on'  their  god  in  order  to  place  themselves 
in  close  fellowship  with  him.     We  are  reminded  of  Paul's  words  that  all 
who  are  baptised  into  Christ  have  '  put  on '  Christ,  and  that  the  bread  we 
break  in  the  Lord's  Supper  and  the  consecrated  cup  are  the  'fellowship  of 
the  body  and  blood  of  Christ.' "    Primitive  Christianity,  i,  63. 

2  The  passage  from  the  De  Err  ore  Profanarum  Religionum  (c.  347  A.D.) 
is  quoted  by  Pfleiderer  in  his  Early  Christian  Conception  of  Christ,  127. 

3  Taylor,  The  Classical  Heritage  of  the  Middle  Ages,  94. 


214  Catholicism 

Jesus  Christ.  "*  This  brings  us  to  an  idea  that  came  down 
from  the  earliest  times. 2  In  primitive  thought  a  personal 
name  is  not  a  mere  appellation,  but  an  integral  part  of 
the  man's  self,  or  an  independent  hypostasis  of  his  nature 
and  being;  according  to  this  the  Eskimo  hold  that  a  man 
consists  of  three  parts,  his  body,  his  soul,  and  his  name. 
Hence  the  cursing  or  denunciation  of  a  man's  name  works 
injury  to  the  man  himself.  Hence  too  a  change  of  name  is 
equivalent  to  a  change  of  personality,  and  becomes  a 
method  of  escape  from  the  evil  fate  that  pursues  the  old 
name, — as  when  the  prudent  Dyak  changes  his  name 
after  an  attack  of  illness,  so  that  the  demon  who  sent 
it  may  not  recognise  him.  Again,  the  power  for  good  or 
evil  which  a  being  owns  can  be  communicated  through 
its  name,  and  so  the  Flamen  Dialis  would  not  pronounce 
the  name  of  dog  lest  he  should  be  contaminated  by  the 
unclean  beast.  It  is  a  principle  of  magic  that  utterance 
of  a  name  gives  a  hold  over  the  person  who  bears  it,  and 
summoning  the  dead  by  name  was  the  art  of  the  necro- 
mancer. More  mysteriously  potent  than  all  others  were 
the  names  of  the  gods. 3  Knowledge  of  a  divine  name  en- 
abled one  to  exert  power  over  the  god  himself,  and  the 
Indigitamenta  (lists  of  such  names)  of  the  Roman  pontiffs 
gave  them  the  mastery  of  the  spiritual  world.  It  was  a 
power  that  might  be  abused,  and  here  is  the  explanation 
of  the  doctrine  of  "the  ineffable  Name, "  common  to  three 
continents.  It  was  the  fear  of  indignity  or  injury  to  their 
god  through  the  malicious  use  of  his  name  that  led  a  people 
to  conceal  it  and  forbid  its  utterance.  Thus  among  the 
Jews: 

1  Acts  viii,  16;  xix,  5.     Cp.  iii,  6;  iv,  10  and  12. 

2  See  Brinton,  Religions  of  Primitive  Peoples,  93-102. 

3  "The  formula  nomina  sunt  numina  was  valid  in  all  the  old  religions  of 
the  Mediterranean  area,  including  earlier  and  even  later  Christianity:  the 
divine  name  was  felt  to  be  part  of  the  divine  essence  and  in  itself  of  super- 
natural potency."     Farnell,  The  Evolution  of  Religion,  32. 


Catholicism  215 

the  mysterious  name  of  God  which  was  never  to  be  pro- 
nounced was  written  by  means  of  four  consonants;  between 
these  the  vowels  of  Adonai,  the  Lord,  were  conventionally 
inserted,  producing  the  name  Jehovah.  The  idea  that  the 
name  of  God  is  taboo  and  should  not  be  uttered  is  found  among 
many  races.1 

This  old  superstition  of  real  existence  in  names  we  meet 
with  in  the  Old  Testament  and  the  New,  and  it  was  re- 
tained in  Christianity.2  The  power  by  which  Jesus 
healed  the  diseased  and  devil-possessed  could  be  appro- 
priated in  his  absence  or  after  his  death  by  invocation  of 
his  name.  "The  name  of  Jesus  was  regarded  by  the 
early  Church  as  magical  in  itself.  Arnobius  says  of  him: 
'Whose  name  when  heard  puts  to  flight  evil  spirits,  im- 
poses silence  on  soothsayers  and  augurs,  and  frustrates 
the  efforts  of  magicians.  "'3  Though  their  original  mean- 
ing is  lost,  phrases  expressive  of  the  primitive  idea  still 
hold  a  place  in  the  service-books  of  the  Anglican  commun- 
ion, such  as:  to  the  glory  of  thy  holy  Name;  give  thanks 
unto  thy  Name;  we  bless  and  praise  thy  Name;  the  Lord's 
Name  be  praised;  in  the  Name  and  mediation  of  Jesus 
Christ,  etc. 

1  Reinach,  Orpheus:  A  General  History  of  Religions,  177. 

"  How  few  who  repeat  the  second  clause  of  that  prayer  on  which  we  have 
all  been  brought  up  reflect  that  the  Name  referred  to,  whatever  it  was,  is 
now  through  long  concealment  totally  lost."  Brinton,  op.  cit.,  98. 

3  A  few  instances  may  be  cited:  Ex.  xxiii,  21 :  Obey  his  voice,  for  my 
name  is  in  him;  Jer.  vii,  12 :  Shiloh  where  I  have  set  my  name;  Ps.  liv,  I : 
Save  me  by  thy  name;  Ps.  Ixxiv,  7:  The  dwelling-place  of  thy  name; 
Malachi  i,  n:  My  name  shall  be  great  among  the  Gentiles;  Matt,  vii, 
22 :  Did  we  not  prophesy  by  thy  name,  etc. ;  xviii,  20 :  Where  two  or  three 
are  gathered  in  my  name,  there  am  I  in  the  midst  of  them;  John  xx,  31: 
That  believing  ye  may  have  lif  e  through  his  name ;  Acts  iii,  6 :  In  the  name 
of  Jesus  Christ  rise  up  and  walk ;  16 :  His  name,  through  faith  in  his  name, 
hath  made  this  man  strong ;  iv,  7 :  By  what  power  or  by  what  name  have 
ye  done  this;  I  Cor.  13:  Were  ye  baptised  into  the  name  of  Paul;  15: 
Lest  any  man  should  say  that  ye  were  baptised  into  my  name. 

3  Brinton,  op.  cit.t  100. 


216  Catholicism 

In  Baptism  this  power  of  the  spoken  name  is  rein- 
forced by  that  of  the  life-giving  water,  and  here  again 
we  come  upon  a  primitive  belief.  In  Eastern  lands, 
where  the  fertility  of  the  soil  is  largely  dependent  upon 
the  water  supply,  running,  or  "living"  water  was  an  ob- 
ject of  the  highest  reverence,  as  instinct  with  divine  life 
and  energy.1  Sanctuaries  arose  beside  the  spring,  or 
river  source,  where  the  service  rendered  to  the  sacred  fount 
implied  that  the  divinity  addressed  inhabited  the  water. 
Hence  the  later  anthropomorphic  deity  is  born  of  the 
water — as  Aphrodite  sprang  from  the  sea-foam;  or  the 
waters  obtain  their  sanctity  from  the  god's  descending 
into  them — as  the  angel  who  came  down  to  trouble  the 
pool  of  Bethesda  gave  it  its  healing  power  (John  v,  4); 
or,  in  other  cases,  the  curative  properties  of  mineral 
springs,  which  naturally  enjoyed  a  special  reverence,  are 
ascribed  to  the  exertion  of  their  immanent  divine  energies. 
Again,  certain  waters,  like  those  of  Aphaca,  where  a 
cataract  falls  into  a  deep  gorge,  were  credited  with  mysteri- 
ous properties  and  became  the  seats  of  oracles ;  and  it  was 
owing  to  the  divine  power  in  water  that  the  Pythia  at 
Delphi,  who  drank  of  the  Castalian  spring,  was  brought 
into  the  condition  of  prophetic  ecstasy  and  inspiration. 
So  also,  according  to  Wellhausen  (Proleg.  to  Hist.  Israel, 
343),  it  is  the  oldest  Hebrew  tradition  that  the  Law  took 
its  origin  in  the  sentences  pronounced  by  Moses  at  the 
sanctuary  of  Kadesh  beside  the  "fountain  of  judgment" 
(Gen.  xiv,  7),  so  called  because  cases  too  hard  for  man 
were  there  referred  to  the  divine  decision.2 

1  The  same  animistic  idea  appears  in  Tertullian's  De  Baptismo  (ch.  v) 
where  he  derives  the  saving  efficacy  of  baptism  from  the  supernatural 
power  indwelling  in  water  since  the  creation,  when  the  Spirit  of  God  brooded 
over  the  waters — a  power  heightened  by  the  invocation  of  the  name  of 
Christ. 

2  On  this  subject  see  Robinson  Smith,  Religion  of  the  Semites,  166-184. 
The  author  considers  that  the  ordeal  by  water  derives  from  the  water  oracle 


Catholicism  217 

The  first  effect  sought  in  Baptism  was  purification  from 
sin.  To  understand  how  the  rite  was  supposed  to  possess 
this  efficacy  we  must  look  back  to  the  ideas  underlying 
the  old  rituals  of  purification.  The  first  of  these  is  that 
impurity  or  defilement  is  contracted  from  having  to  do 
with  certain  things  or  persons :  for  instance,  blood,  a  dead 
body,  a  new-born  child  and  its  mother;  for  the  sense  of  a 
divine  mystery  in  life  makes  all  these  especially  taboo. 
In  the  conception  of  taboo  there  is  no  distinction  between 
things  holy  and  things  unclean,  both  of  which  are  sources 
of  vague,  mysterious  danger.  Thus  the  flesh  of  swine  was 
taboo  to  the  Syrians,  but  whether  because  the  animal 
was  accounted  sacred  or  unclean  does  not  appear.  There 
was  no  practical  difference  between  the  infection  of 
holiness  and  the  pollution  of  uncleanness,  and  it  was  on 
account  of  its  holiness  that  the  Jewish  Book  of  the  Law 
"defiled  the  hands";  so  among  the  Persians  the  corpse 
of  the  priest,  the  most  holy  person,  had  the  greatest 
defiling  power. 

The  Latin  term  sacer  has  the  double  meaning  of  holy  and 
accursed:  from  the  same  Greek  root,  df,  spring  a  word  con- 
noting holiness  and  a  word  meaning  pollution.  Primeval 
thought  holds  together  in  a  vague  unity  ideas  that  afterward 
differentiate  and  become  antithetical.1 

It  is  in  the  notions  of  unclean  and  holy  that  we  find  the 
origin  of  mourning  attire  and  of  "Sunday  best"  clothes. 
His  contact  with  the  deceased  defiles  the  clothes  a  mourner 
wears,  and  they  can  no  longer  be  used  after  the  days  of 
his  impurity  are  over.  So  he  keeps  to  one  set  of  mourning 


that  spoke  by  accepting  or  rejecting  the  offering  of  the  applicant.  So 
in  witchcraft  trials  the  accused  who  did  not  sink  was  proved  to  be  guilty, 
according  to  the  old  belief  that  the  sacred  element  rejects  the  criminal. 
Among  the  Jews  the  ordeal  was  by  drinking  holy  water.  Numbers  v,  1 1-3 1 . 
1  Farnell,  The  Evolution  of  Religion,  97. 


2i  8  Catholicism 

garments,  not  to  spoil  too  many,  and  they  must  be  of 
a  special  color,  so  as  to  warn  others  against  approaching 
him  and  taking  the  contagion  of  uncleanness.  Again, 
the  clothes  a  man  wears  at  divine  worship  acquire  a 
sanctity  which  renders  them  taboo  for  use  on  ordinary 
occasions.  Special  garments  were  therefore  reserved 
for  this  purpose,  and  when  at  an  early  day  sacrifices 
became  occasions  of  social  festivity,  holy  dress  became 
one  with  gala  dress  and  the  clothes  of  worship  would  be 
the  best  clothes  the  wearer  possessed. 

Besides  holy  things,  inherently  taboo,  anything  might 
become  tabooed:  common  utensils;  food,  under  certain 
conditions;  strangers,  as  belonging  to  strange  gods;  a 
name,  or  a  day — e.g.,  the  seventh  day  of  the  week  when  all 
work  was  forbidden,  a  taboo  day  taken  over  by  the  Baby- 
lonians from  the  indigenous  Akkadians  of  Mesopotamia 
and  descending  to  the  Hebrews,  or  the  ^epai  dn:o<pp<*&e<; 
and  dies  nefasti  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans  in  historic 
times.1  Amidst  the  multiplicity  of  things  taboo  it  was 
scarcely  possible  to  walk  so  warily  as  to  escape  the  infec- 
tion of  uncleanness.  To  avoid  direct  contact  with  the 
person  or  thing  tabooed  would  be  difficult  enough,  but 
the  case  was  made  harder  for  the  well-meaning  man  when 
merely  to  catch  sight  of  the  tabooed  object,  or  be  seen 
by  the  tabooed  person,  was  no  less  defiling  than  to  touch, 
taste,  or  handle.  Under  such  conditions  of  daily  life  it 
became  a  necessity  to  provide  means  whereby  one  might 
purge  himself  from  this  practically  inevitable  uncleanness. 
Fire  suggested  itself  as  in  its  own  nature  a  consumer  of 
impurities,  and  the  custom  still  prevalent  among  the 
German  peasantry  in  certain  districts  of  leaping  over  a 
bonfire  on  midsummer  eve  is  probably  the  relic  of  an  an- 

1  Cf.  Tiele,  Outlines  of  the  History  of  Religion,  83-84.  It  is  curious  that 
the  Jewish  Sabbath,  so  rigidly  observed  by  the  Pharisees  and  the  English 
Puritans,  was  not  even  of  Semitic  origin. 


Catholicism  219 

cient  rite  of  fire-purification.  Ashes  too,  as  possessing  a 
power  derivative  from  fire,  might  be  employed  for  pur- 
poses of  lustration;  e.g.  the  ashes  of  the  red  heifer  in  the 
Hebrew  cathartic  ritual.  On  the  other  hand,  liquid 
substances,  perhaps  on  account  of  their  greater  mobility, 
were  thought  more  dangerous  conductors  than  dry  ones 
of  taboo  infection.  In  Persia  Jews  were  not  allowed 
to  go  out  of  the  house  on  a  rainy  day  lest  the  impurity 
of  a  strange  religion,  conducted  through  the  rain,  should 
pass  to  the  Mazdeans.  *  From  this  an  ingenious  conclu- 
sion was  drawn.  If  liquids  have  a  natural  affinity  with 
contagion,  then  if  we  take  them  in  an  uninfected  state 
and  use  them  for  lustration,  they  will  readily  absorb 
the  impurity  that  clings  to  us  and  rid  us  of  it.  This  view 
of  the  matter,  combining  with  the  old  reverence  for 
water  as  possessed  of  divine  powers,  made  that  element 
the  most  widely  accepted  vehicle  of  ritual  purification. 

In  course  of  time  the  rites  of  purification  from  technical 
uncleanness  gradually  acquired  an  ethical  import — 
although  the  ethical  sentiment  evolving  was  somewhat 
blind  and  feeble,  like  other  new-born  things — and  it  was 
believed  that  ablutions  or  aspersions  could  cleanse  a  man 
from  sin  and  guilt  as  well  as  from  outward  defilement. 
As  sprinkling  with  water  removes  the  contagion  of  the 
corpse  from  the  relatives  of  the  deceased,  so  the  murderer 
may  be  purified  of  his  crime  in  like  manner,  though  his  is  a 
more  difficult  case  in  that  the  water  must  be  drawn  from 
fourteen  different  springs.  This  extension  of  the  cathartic 
idea  will  be  intelligible  if  we  consider  that  the  odd,  and 
to  us  irrational,  beliefs  of  early  men  come  in  great  part 
from  the  drawing  of  fallacious  analogies,  and  from  mis- 
taking a  mental  association  of  ideas  for  a  real  relation  of 
things — as,  for  instance,  since  blood  is  of  all  things  most 
taboo,  therefore  red  berries  are  taboo  because  they  re- 

1  Darmesteter,  Zend-Avesta,  quoted  in  Farnell,  op.  cit.,  99. 


220  Catholicism 

semble  it  in  color.  Furthermore,  we  have  to  bear  in 
mind  that  in  the  view  of  primitive  men  the  physical  and 
the  spiritual  were  by  no  means  sharply  distinguished;  the 
attributes  of  either  were  interchangeable,  and  the  same 
word  stood  for  corporeal  impurity  and  the  pollution  of  the 
soul.1  The  Zulus  say,  You  are  dirty,  when  they  mean, 
You  have  done  wrong;  and  this  is  no  metaphor,  but  the 
bodily  state  is  looked  upon  as  transferred  inward.2  And 
so,  owing  to  the  affinity  or  correlation  of  things  material 
and  spiritual,  the  phrases,  a  pure  heart,  an  unclean 
thought,  the  stain  of  sin,  were  originally  understood  in  a 
quite  literal  sense,  and  it  was  naturally  supposed  that  sin, 
like  a  physical  smirch,  could  be  washed  away.  In  Peru, 
for  example,  there  was  a  ceremony  of  purification  when 
the  people  led  by  the  priests  marched  out  to  bathe  in  the 
river,  crying,  Go  forth  all  evils!  Though  the  ceremonial 
purity  with  which  a  man  is  thus  outwardly  clothed  is  a 
quality  in  no  way  belonging  to  the  man  himself,  yet  for 
primitive  ways  of  thought  it  was  all-sufficient.  And  the 
primitive  ideas  were  long-lived.  The  Pharisees  were  not 
peculiarly  to  blame  for  attaching  equal  importance  to  the 
ceremonial  and  the  moral  commandments  of  the  Law. 
These  were  of  equal  sanctity  and  obligation  in  the  eyes 
of  all  early  peoples,  or  rather  no  such  distinction  as  we 
make  was  recognised.  For  there  was  no  difference  between 
wilful  and  involuntary  sin.  The  intentions  of  the  taboo- 
breaker  have  no  effect  upon  the  consequences  to  himself. 
It  may  be  in  ignorance  or  accidentally  that  he  violates  a 
taboo,  but  his  uncleanness  comes  upon  him  as  certainly 
as  one  receives  an  electric  shock  from  an  electric  current; 
for  the  taboo  acts  like  a  law  of  nature  and  falls  as  the  rain 

1  Even  in  historic  times  spirit  was  still  conceived  not  as  purely  im- 
material, but  as  a  finer,  rarer  mode  of  matter;  and  such  was  the  conception 
of  St.  Paul,  I  Cor.  xv.  Cp.  Hausrath,  Times  of  the  Apostles,  iii,  113. 

3  Leslie,  Among  the  Zulus,  170. 


Catholicism  221 

falls  upon  the  just  and  unjust.  Now,  when  sin  is  the  same 
thing  whether  or  not  it  have  a  moral  quality,  or  when  the 
idea  of  morality  has  not  clearly  emerged  to  view,  so  that 
no  essential  difference  appears  between  deliberate  wrong 
doing  and  a  ritualistic  offence,  then  a  mechanical  rite  of 
purification  may  well  seem  all  that  need  be  required  to 
clear  and  restore  alike  the  moral  or  the  technical  sinner. 
But  when  an  enlightened  psychology  has  divested  the 
conception  of  sin  of  its  materialistic  associations,  and  with 
the  advance  of  ethical  consciousness  it  comes  to  be 
regarded  as  a  purely  inward  corruption  of  the  soul,  then  the 
ground  and  raison  d'etre  of  the  archaic  rituals  is  taken 
away  and  they  no  longer  have  a  modern  use — unless  it  be 
as  merely  symbolic  rites.  And  in  such  use  there  is  al- 
ways danger  to  the  uneducated  worshipper.  There  is  no 
harm — if  some  can  see  no  good — in  a  symbolic  rite  which 
is  understood  to  be  merely  such,  but  if  it  is  believed  to 
have  in  itself  a  spiritual  efficacy  we  are  back  in  primitive 
materialism. 

The  practice  of  infant  baptism  had  no  place  in  the  early 
Church,  where  baptism  was  taken  seriously;  it  was  the 
later  adoption  of  a  rite  of  world-wide  extension,  from  the 
Teutonic  tribes,  who  plunged  the  baby  into  running 
water,  to  the  Aztec  midwife  bathing  her  new-born  charge 
with  the  prayer,  "  May  this  water  purify  and  whiten  thy 
heart  and  wash  away  all  that  is  evil."  It  is  interesting,  by 
the  way,  to  find  that  the  Mayas  of  Yucatan  called  infant 
baptism  the  "second  birth."  In  the  view  of  the  early 
Church  it  was  at  the  baptism  of  Jesus,  when  the  Spirit  de- 
scended upon  him,  that  he  became  Messiah  and  Son  of  God. 
Later  on,  when  the  belief  in  his  miraculous  birth  arose,  his 
divine  sonship  was  antedated  to  the  moment  of  concep- 
tion, and  the  baptism  of  a  divine  being  ceased  to  have 
any  definite  meaning  or  apparent  purpose.  With  this, 
baptism  as  such,  the  baptism  of  believers,  lost  its  primi- 


222  Catholicism 

tive  moral  and  spiritual  significance,  and  became  an 
opus  operatum  requiring  no  intelligence  on  the  part  of  the 
recipient.  So  conservative  a  scholar  as  Dr.  Gardner  con- 
demns the  baptism  of  infants — since  it  dispensed  with  the 
profession  of  faith  and  repentance  required  from  adults 
— as  "a  reversion  to  materialism  and  an  abandonment 
of  the  spirit  of  Christ"  (The  Growth  of  Christianity, 
137).  The  primitive  man  seems  to  reappear  in  the 
Jesuit  missionary  to  the  Hurons  who  surreptitiously 
sprinkled  a  few  drops  of  holy  water  on  a  baby's  brow, 
with  a  muttered  formula,  and  thought  he  was  thereby 
saving  a  heathen  soul.  That  such  an  act  was  prompted 
by  a  notion  of  the  sacrament  as  a  magic  charm  which 
may  properly  be  called  superstitious  will  perhaps  be 
generally  admitted,  but  is  it  other  than  an  extreme  applica- 
tion of  sacramental  principles  that  obtain  wide  acceptance 
today?  What  exact  meaning,  one  is  moved  to  ask,  at- 
taches to  the  term  "mystical"  in  that  prayer  of  the 
Episcopal  Baptismal  Office:  "Sanctify  this  water  to  the 
mystical  washing  away  of  sin"?  And  again,  in  what 
sense  are  we  to  understand  the  statement  that  "none 
can  enter  into  the  Kingdom  of  God  except  he  be  re- 
generate and  born  anew  of  water  and  of  the  Holy  Ghost, " 
and  the  closing  prayer  that  God  may  grant  that  as  the 
baptised  child  "is  made  partaker  of  the  death  of  His  Son, 
he  may  also  be  partaker  of  his  resurrection ' '  ? 

These  words  bring  us  to  a  second  effect  of  Christian 
Baptism,  according  to  the  faith  of  the  Church,  and  again 
a  glance  at  its  antecedents  in  primitive  and  heathen 
thought  may  be  worth  our  while.  The  Pauline  teaching 
of  mystical  union  with  the  Christ  in  his  death  and  resurrec- 
tion, a  doctrine  entirely  strange  to  the  first  Christians,  was 
nothing  new  to  the  converts  acquainted  with  the  rites 
of  Adonis,  Osiris,  and  Dionysos  in  which  the  god  who  dies 
and  returns  to  life — originally  the  vegetation  spirit  slain 


Catholicism  223 

by  the  chill  breath  of  winter  to  revive  with  the  return 
of  spring — guarantees  by  his  resurrection  from  death  a 
like  deliverance  to  his  votaries.  This  myth  of  the  dying 
and  reviving  god,  arising  from  man's  yearly  experience 
of  the  seasonal  changes,  was  naturally  wide-spread — that 
of  the  Teutonic  Balder  is  perhaps  the  most  familiar— 
and  it  carried  with  it  rites  of  sorrow  and  of  joy  believed 
to  be  influential  in  preserving  the  divine  life  in  growing 
things  from  threatened  destruction  and  helping  forward 
the  victorious  resurrection.  When  in  later  days  man's 
anxiety  for  the  life  of  nature  gave  place  to  concern  for  his 
own  life  after  death,  then  the  old  rituals  were  modified 
and  now  brought  to  the  initiated  the  pledge  of  a  life  to 
come.  At  the  spring  festival  of  Adonis  at  Antioch, 
which  was  preceded  by  a  season  of  fasting,  the  death  of 
the  god  was  represented  on  the  first  day,  amidst  the 
lamentations  of  the  worshippers  gathered  around  his  bier, 
on  the  next  his  burial,  and  on  the  third  his  resurrection 
was  proclaimed,  and  in  token  of  his  translation  to  heaven 
his  image  was  made  to  rise  in  air. x  In  these  ceremonies 
the  belief  that  the  worshippers  became  partakers  of  the 
god's  risen  life  through  mystical  participation  in  his 
death  was  visually  expressed  in  symbolic  rites,  and  the 
whole  celebration  closed  with  the  Hilaria,  or  feast  of 
rejoicing. 

In  many  of  the  Mysteries  the  principal  ceremony  of 
initiation  was  a  baptism  with  holy  water,  including  the 
signing  of  the  forehead  with  a  covenant  sign,  and  by  this 
the  neophyte  was  cleansed  from  past  guilt  and  recreated 

1  A  similar  ceremony  is  a  feature  of  the  Easter  celebration  in  the  Greek 
Church  at  the  present  day.  It  accords  with  the  third  day  observances  of 
the  Adonis  festival  that  Paul  regards  the  Ascension  as  following  immedi- 
ately upon  the  Resurrection;  it  was  the  heavenly  Christ  who  appeared  to 
Peter  and  the  others.  The  Apostle  borrows  from  the  Mysteries  the  simile 
he  makes  use  of  in  I  Cor.  xv:  the  grain  of  wheat  which  springs  into  life 
when  planted  in  the  earth  is  the  Eleusinian  symbol  of  the  immortal  soul. 


224  Catholicism 

to  a  new  life.  In  the  Mithra  liturgy  this  baptism  is 
represented  as  a  mystical  dying  and  rebirth,  and  the 
initiated  speak  of  themselves  as  "reborn  for  eternity." 
Firmicus  Maternus  is  so  impressed  with  the  resemblance 
of  the  Mysteries  to  the  sacramental  system  of  the  Church 
that  he  exclaims:  "Truly  the  Devil  has  Christians  of  his 
own,"  and  Tertullian  explains  the  Mithraic  rites  as  an 
aping  of  Christian  usages  by  the  demons.  Considering, 
however,  that  the  heathen  Mysteries  were  much  older 
than  the  Christian  it  would  seem  that  the  aping  was  the 
other  way  about.  So  exact  indeed  is  the  correspondence 
of  these  pagan  ideas  with  Paul's  doctrine  of  Christian 
baptism  in  Rom.  vi,  that  the  fact  of  their  historical  con- 
nection seems  scarcely  disputable.1  It  is  probable  that 
Paul  had  some  acquaintance  with  the  Mithra  worship, 
for  as  early  as  the  time  of  Pompey  Tarsus  had  become  a 
seat  of  that  cult  and  it  made  its  way  westward  from  that 
point.  Pfleiderer  remarks  that  no  other  place  offered  a 
better  opportunity  for  observation  of  the  heathen  religions. 
At  Antioch,  however,  it  seems  safe  to  say,  their  influence 
first  made  itself  felt.  There  in  the  mixed  congregation 
of  Christian  Hellenists  and  their  Syrian  converts  the 
new  faith  declared  itself  as  one  distinct  from  Judaism,  and 
its  deliverance  from  the  fetters  of  Jewish  rites  and  cere- 
monies could  only  be  effected  by  replacing  them  with  new 
ones  of  its  own.  But  ritual  practices  can  even  less  than 
civic  constitutions  be  created  out  of  hand  and  from 
nothing ;  they  must  attach  themselves  to  something  already 
existing  and  rooted  in  the  time-honored  past.  In  the 
situation  in  which  it  found  itself  the  new  community  could 
do  no  other  than  look  to  the  heathen  environment  and 

'"The  idea  commonly  expressed  in  the  mystic  initiations,  that  the 
catechumen  died  to  his  old  life  and  was  born  again,  was  eagerly  adopted 
and  developed  by  the  new  religion  and  left  its  imprint  on  the  ritual." 
Farnell,  op.  cit.,  57. 


Catholicism  225 

take  into  the  Christian  worship  those  mystical  rites  which 
could  be  brought  into  connection  with  the  person  of  Christ 
and  interpreted  by  the  Pauline  theology.  To  this  was 
owing  in  great  part  the  success  of  the  Gentile  mission. 
The  votary  of  Adonis  or  of  Mithra  was  not  called  upon  to 
abandon  the  practices  of  his  old  religion,  but  to  transfer 
them  to  the  worship  of  the  new  divinity,  Christ.1  This 
was  Christianity  made  easy.  But  in  so  far  as  it  admits  its 
dependence  on  the  external  mediation  of  material  rites  a 
religion  of  the  spirit  is  no  longer  itself.  The  "  success " 
of  Christianity  on  these  terms  seems  success  of  a  somewhat 
questionable  sort,  and  its  victory  over  heathenism  looks 
not  wholly  unlike  a  surrender.  At  least,  as  so  often  hap- 
pens, the  conquerors  were  to  some  extent  subdued  by  the 
vanquished ;  and  if  Augustine  could  look  complacently  on 
the  borrowing  of  the  rites  and  symbols  of  paganism  as  a 
"spoiling  of  the  Egyptians,"  the  Egyptians  had  their 
revenge.  Instead  of  an  open  Gospel  of  trustful  piety, 
fraternal  love,  and  a  purer  way  of  life,  Christianity  was 
made  into  a  Mystery,  a  syncretism  of  archaic  supersti- 
tions, and  loaded  with  the  heritage  of  the  heathen  past.2 

Augustine's  view  of  the  matter  is  nevertheless  shared  by 
many.  Dr.  Gardner,  for  example,  speaks  of  "the  spoils 
taken  by  Christianity  from  the  mystic  religions  of  the 
East"  (Growth  of  Christianity,  130:  See  92  for  the  same 

1  "Converts  who  found  it  hard  to  part  with  consecrated  phrases  and 
forms  of  devotion  might  address  Jesus  in  epithets  sacred  to  the  sun."     Dill, 
Roman  Society  from  Nero  to  Marcus  Aurelius,  622. 

It  may  be  added  that  Sunday,  the  "first  day  of  the  week"  of  Christian 
worship,  was  the  day  sacred  to  Mithra,  and  the  great  festival  of  that  Spirit 
of  Light,  whose  worship  borrowed  much  from  heliolatry,  was  held  on 
December  25th,  the  birthday  of  the  unconquered  sun — dies  natalis  invicti 
solis,  as  the  old  calendars  have  it — and  the  day  taken  over  by  the  Church 
for  the  feast  of  the  Nativity  of  Christ,  the  "sun  of  righteousness." 

2  This  transformation,  so  far  as  concerns  the  sacraments,  is  fully  exhibited 
by  Dean  Hatch  in  his  Hibbert  Lectures,  The  Influence  of  Greek  Ideas  and 
Usages  upon  the  Christian  Church— Lecture  x,  The  Influence  of  the  Mysteries. 

IS 


226  Catholicism 

phrase),  and  remarks  that  "the  debt  of  Christianity  in  this 
direction  is  being  more  fully  recognised  year  by  year" 
(Ib.,  131).  His  phrase  in  the  chapter  titles,  the  "Bap- 
tism" of  Hellas,  of  Asia,  signifies  the  Christianisation  of 
the  rival  cults,  but  how  largely  it  was  a  baptism  received, 
and  its  effect  the  heathenising  of  Christianity,  may  be 
read  in  his  own  admissions.  He  tells  us  that  in  setting 
Christ  in  the  place  of  Mithra  or  Zeus  Soter  Paul  "wrested 
from  the  heathen  one  of  the  most  effective  of  their  weap- 
ons, and  raised  the  idea  of  salvation  by  as  much  as  the 
Christ  of  the  Church  was  higher  than  the  deities  of 
paganism"  (134).  The  comment  suggests  itself  that  the 
weapon  was  two-edged,  and  its  actual  effect  was  to  lower 
the  Christ  of  the  Church  to  the  level  of  the  pagan  deities. 
In  justification  of  the  taking  over  of  heathen  rites  and 
ritual  ideas  it  is  alleged  that  the  converts  to  Christianity 
"expected  in  the  new  religion  the  satisfaction  of  needs 
which  had  been  met  by  the  ancient  cults,"  and  that 
"Christianity  had  to  satisfy  the  same  religious  feelings 
which  the  rival  religions  had  endeavored  to  meet  (138  and 
125).  But  were  these  feelings  that  ought  to  have  been 
fostered  and  needs  that  ought  to  have  been  catered 
to?  Considering  their  nature  it  would  seem  that 
Christianity  no  more  "had  to  satisfy"  them  than  one 
has  to  satisfy  a  child's  demand  for  indigestible  cake. 
Again,  we  are  told  that  "the  triumph  of  metaphysics  in 
early  Christianity"  is  not  to  be  regretted,  for  "it  was 
necessary  to  the  vitality  of  the  Church"  (98  and  101). 
This  reminds  us  of  the  old  story  of  the  thief's  plea  to 
Richelieu,  "One  must  live,"  and  the  reply,  "I  don't  see 
the  necessity  for  it."  Jesus  too  might  have  consulted 
the  religious  needs  or  adopted  the  doctrines  of  the  Phari- 
sees, and  this  was  plainly  necessary  to  his  vitality,  but  he 
would  die  rather  than  compromise  the  truth.  On  the 
whole  the  view  of  Christianity  as  an  "assimilation  and 


Catholicism  227 

consecration"  of  Judaism,  Greek  speculation  and  super- 
stitions whose  "roots  stretched  far  back  into  the  soil 
of  primitive  religion"  seems  to  leave  the  part  of  the 
Founder  of  Christianity — as  Jesus  is  repeatedly  called 
in  this  book — relatively  insignificant;  but  happily  it  is 
one  that  to  the  same  extent  relieves  him  of  responsibility 
for  the  structure  actually  founded.  The  truth  is,  the 
men  of  the  decadent  Greco-Roman  world  took  the  new 
religion  that  came  to  them  and  made  it  into  what  they 
wished  it  to  be — a  religion  of  sacramentalism  and  sacerdo- 
talism, of  dogma  and  orthodoxy,  of  legality  and  blind 
obedience  and  spiritless  routine ;  a  religion  in  every  cog  and 
crank  of  its  machinery  the  absolute  contradiction  of  the 
life-giving  teachings  of  the  Master  it  professed  to  adore. 


NOTE 

This  section  may  conclude  with  a  brief  mention  of  some 
of  the  many  features  of  earlier  and  later  Christianity  which 
are  traceable  to  an  origin  in  primitive  usages  and  ways 
of  thought.  The  ecstatic  "speaking  with  tongues,"  so 
closely  related  to  the  raptures  and  ravings  of  the  orgiastic 
Mystery-cults,  derives  from  the  animistic  beliefs  in 
"possession"  by  a  supernatural  being,  and  in  the  value 
of  words  independently  of  their  meaning.1  In  the 
immaturity  of  the  human  mind,  when  its  reasoning 
powers  lay  dormant  and  it  had  not  fully  come  to  self 
possession,  the  blind  activities  of  the  subliminal  con- 
sciousness held  unchecked  sway,  and  a  pathological  sub- 
jective condition  which  none  could  rightly  understand  or 
account  for  was  held  to  betoken  the  presence  of  a  divine 

1  "The  wild  and  unbridled  enthusiasm  of  ancient  religious  usages  was 
here  renewed  in  Christianity  on  Greek  soil.  Paul  was  conscious  that  it  had 
got  the  length  of  a  disease." 

Weizsacker,  The  Apostolic  Age,  ii,  275. 


228  Catholicism 

agency.  Their  incoherent  volubility  of  utterance  which 
made  evident  their  inspiration,  or  "enthusiasm" — a  tech- 
nical term  signifying  being  in  the  god,  or  filled  with  the 
god — won  the  people's  reverence  for  the  Shaman  and 
the  Mantis  and  the  other  progenitors  of  the  prophet  and 
the  priest. x  And  since  words  had  in  themselves  an  occult 
power,  it  mattered  not  that  the  outpourings  of  these  holy 
men  were  unintelligible.  Indeed  the  most  potent  of  all 
words  were  those  whose  meaning  was  lost — as  in  the  case 
of  the  Salian  Litany  which  the  young  Aurelius  recited 
with  pious  care — or  those  which  never  had  any  meaning 
at  all,  such  as  charms  and  spells,  the  rhythmic  formulae  of 
exorcism  and  the  cabalistic  jargon  of  medieval  diviners. 
Not  only  a  phrase  or  two,  but  long  addresses  might  be 
uttered  in  articulate  sounds  conveying  no  sense  whatever ; 
it  was  the  divine  spirit  expressing  itself  through  human 
organs,  but  in  speech  unknown  to  human  ears.  This 
was  the  gift  of  "tongues"  which  St.  Paul  treats  of  in 
I  Cor.  xiv,  and  which  the  author  of  Acts  mistakes  for 
discourse  in  a  foreign  language  (Acts  ii,  4— 12).2 

When  the  Eucharist  had  become  a  sacrifice  in  the  view 
of  the  Church  special  robes  were  prescribed  for  the  cele- 
brant, and  the  cope,  alb,  and  chasuble  were  deemed 
necessary  to  his  due  performance  of  sacramental  tunc- 
tions.  These  priestly  vestments  arrive  at  the  last  stage 
of  a  serial  development,  but  for  their  origin  we  must  go 
back  to  Totemism.  The  oldest  form  of  garment  appro- 
priate to  the  sacrificial  office  was  the  skin  of  the  victim, 

1 A  luminous  treatment  of  this  subject  may  be  found  in  A.  ReVille's 
Prolegomenes  de  I'histoire  des  Religious,  Partie  ii,  chs.  iv  and  v. 

3  The  real  character  of  the  Apostles'  deliverances  may  be  gathered  from 
the  verses  next  following  (13-18),  where  we  read  that  some  thought  the 
speakers  intoxicated  and  Peter  repelled  the  charge,  explaining  that  what 
the  people  witnessed  was  the  fulfilment  of  Joel's  prophecy:  "It  shall  come 
to  pass  in  the  last  days,  saith  God,  I  will  pour  out  my  Spirit  upon  all 
flesh." 


Catholicism  229 

and  when  the  sacrificer  appeared  at  the  sanctuary  clothed 
in  such  a  skin,  it  was  to  signify  his  kinship  with  the  holy 
animal,  and  as  it  were,  envelop  himself  with  its  sanctity. 
The  Assyrian  cylinders  represent  the  Dagon-worshippers 
bringing  the  fish-sacrifice  to  the  altar  of  the  Fish-god 
draped  or  disguised  in  fish  skins;  and  at  the  annual 
sacrifice  of  a  sheep  to  the  Cyprian  Aphrodite — really 
the  Semitic  sheep-goddess,  Astarte,  taken  over  by  Greek 
worship — the  priests  as  representatives  of  the  religious 
community  were  clad  in  sheep  skins.  The  old  idea  sur- 
vived in  the  animal  masks  worn  by  the  initiated  in  the 
Mystery-cults  to  which  allusion  has  been  made.1 

The  tonsure  of  the  priest  is  a  survival  of  the  primitive 
hair-offering.  The  offering  of  one's  blood,  in  renewal  or 
confirmation  of  the  blood-bond  between  the  worshipper 
and  his  god,  was  a  means  of  recommending  oneself  to  the 
divine  favor  and  of  lending  added  force  to  one's  petitions. 
We  have  an  instance  in  the  case  of  the  priests  of  Baal, 
I  Kings,  xviii,  28.  In  later  times  the  custom  was  retained 
in  the  milder  form  of  puncturing  the  flesh — tatooing — 
in  sign  of  one's  dedication  to  the  god.  Similar  in  purpose 
and  effect  was  the  practice  of  shaving  the  head  or  cutting 
off  the  hair  to  make  of  it  an  offering.  Frequently  this 
was  in  connection  with  special  vows  or  acts  of  devotion, 
such  as  the  vow  of  the  Nazarites  described  in  Numbers 
vi.  The  hair-offering  holds  an  important  place  in  the 
religion  of  the  Semitic  peoples;  in  the  Citium  inscription 
barbers  appear  as  stated  ministers  of  the  temple.  It  is 
found  also  among  the  Greeks — e.g.  in  the  dedication  of  the 
hair  of  Achilles  to  the  river-god  Spercheus — and  it  is 
prescribed  in  the  laws  of  the  Incas.  It  seems  to  originate 
in  the  belief  that  the  hair  is  a  special  seat  of  life  and 
strength — as  we  read  in  the  legends  of  Samson — since  it 
continues  to  grow,  and  so  to  manifest  life,  in  mature  age. 

1  See  W.  Robertson  Smith,  op.  tit.,  293,  310,  and  438. 


230  Catholicism 

For  the  same  reason  nail-parings  were  a  common  offering, 
and  possession  of  hair  from  a  man's  head,  or  cuttings  from 
his  nails,  is  in  early  magic  a  potent  means  of  exerting 
control  over  him. 

Saint  worship  derives  from  lines  of  long  descent.  In 
his  famous  work,  La  Cite  Antique,  Coulanges  has  shown 
how  ancestor-worship  was  the  creative  principle  of  the 
patriarchial  family  among  the  early  Greeks  and  Romans. 
Down  to  imperial  times  the  Manes  were  reverenced  as 
among  the  infernal  gods,  tombs  were  inscribed  D.  M.  for 
Diis  Manibus,  and  the  occurrence  of  this  D.  M.  in  Chris- 
tian epitaphs  shows  the  retention  by  converts  of  the  old 
beliefs.  Ancestor- worship  gave  rise  to  the  cult  of ' '  heroes' ' 
— demigods  or  deified  men — which,  confined  at  first  to 
figures  of  the  mythic  or  legendary  past,  came  to  be  ex- 
tended to  founders  of  dynasties,  lawgivers,  sages,  and 
even  to  athletes,  or  those  whose  eminence  in  any  walk  of 
life  sufficiently  impressed  the  popular  imagination.  A 
curious  instance  of  apotheosis  was  that  of  Antinous,  the 
favorite  of  Hadrian,  whose  temples  were  thronged  for  at 
least  a  century  after  the  emperor's  death  had  removed  all 
interested  motives  to  such  devotion.  This  worship  of 
the  dead  was  taken  over  by  Christianity  either  directly 
— as  where  the  pagan  hero  is  found  lurking  under  the 
later  disguise  of  the  saint — or  in  principle,  when  Chris- 
tians of  reputed  miraculous  powers  or  exceptional  piety 
were  exalted  to  the  rank  of  inferior  divinities  and  received 
the  prayers  and  adoration  of  their  devotees.  The  people 
of  each  district  were  accustomed  to  celebrate  the  memorial 
day  of  their  local  deity  or  hero  with  festivities  in  his 
honor,  and  when  converted  to  Christianity  they  wanted 
something  to  take  the  place  of  these,  and  found  it  in  the 
feast-day  of  the  saint.  Moreover,  the  tutelary  patrons 
of  various  crafts  and  classes — the  gods  who  gave  special 
help  in  special  needs — were  too  near  to  the  heart  of  pagan- 


Catholicism  231 

ism  to  be  simply  done  away  with.  It  was  found  easier 
to  replace  them  with  saints  who  should  undertake  their 
duties;  thus  the  medieval  trade-guilds,  like  the  artisan 
fraternities  of  pagan  times,  had  each  its  semi-divine 
guardian,  and  the  division  of  spiritual  labor  was  carried 
out  minutely  through  a  vast  number  of  saintly  function- 
aries, such  as  S.  Hubert,  patron  of  huntsmen,  S.  Crispin 
of  cobblers,  S.  Cecilia  of  musicians,  S.  Valentine  of  lovers, 
and  S.  Fiacre  of  travelers — whose  name  was  given  to  the 
cabs  of  Paris  in  the  seventeenth  century.1  In  the  can- 
onisation of  those  who  once  were  men  and  women  all  was 
left  to  the  Pope,  and  thus  the  Vicar  of  Christ  succeeded 
to  the  prerogative  which  the  Delphic  Oracle  had  exer- 
Qsed  in  the  official  consecration  of  the  hero.  Whatever 
be  the  orthodox  dogma  as  to  the  status  of  the  saint, 
experience  proves  that  in  the  popular  faith  his  worship 
means  polytheism,  and  as  the  pagan  godlet  often  usurped 
the  place  of  the  Olympians  in  men's  regard,  so  in  many 
outlying  regions  of  Christendom  the  lower  cult  over- 
shadowed the  higher.  It  was  commonly  said  of  S.  Fran- 
cis: Exaudit  quos  non  ipse  audit  Deus;  such  was  the 
impiety  fostered  by  the  adoration  of  saints. 

Mariolatry  may  be  regarded  as  a  natural  development 
of  Catholic  faith  in  answer  to  the  needs  of  the  religious 
heart  after  the  human  Christ  was  lost  in  the  divine  and 
his  place  of  mediator  was  left  vacant ;  yet  it  came  by  ways 
prepared  for  it  in  pagan  thought  and  aspiration,  and  it 
"cannot  be  adequately  explained  without  looking  beyond 
the  limits  of  Christianity."2  The  cult  of  Kore-Parthenos, 
or  17  ayta  xap0evo<;,  who  offered  men  salvation  after  death,  had 

1  Tylor,  Primitive  Culture,  ii,  120-122.  The  author  gives  two  striking 
illustrations  of  the  direct  succession  of  the  Christian  saint  to  the  heathen 
deity,  and  two  examples  of  modern  hagiolatry  which  reveal  a  superstition 
not  less  extreme  than  that  which  prevailed  a  thousand  years  ago. 

a  Farnell,  op.  tit.,  38. 


232  Catholicism 

been  established  long  before  the  Christian  era  on  both 
sides  of  the  ^Egean,  and  that  of  the  Phrygian  Cybele,  0swv 
MifuYjp,  the  earliest  invader  from  the  East,  was  enshrined 
upon  the  Palatine  during  the  second  Punic  war.  The 
Orphic  brotherhoods  seated  the  Mother  by  the  side  of  the 
Son-God  and  the  Father-God,  and  in  all  the  leading 
Mysteries  a  high  place  was  assigned  to  the  Mother  and 
the  Maid.  There  was  a  close  connection  between  the 
two,  traceable  to  the  fact  that  their  originals,  the  Corn- 
Maiden  and  the  Corn-Mother,  were  different  forms  of  the 
same  goddess.  We  find  the  Virgin  Artemis  of  Ephesus 
looked  upon  as  in  some  sort  a  generative  or  maternal 
divinity,  and  it  is  perhaps  more  than  a  coincidence  that 
it  was  this  same  city  which  hailed  with  acclamation  the 
decree  of  the  Synod  pronouncing  the  Virgin  Mary  6eoT<$Ko<;, 
the  Mother  of  God.  There  is  nothing  more  salient  in  the 
history  of  later  paganism  than  the  deep  impress  which  the 
worship  of  the  Holy  Virgin  and  of  the  Mother  of  Gods 
stamped  upon  the  religious  imagination  of  the  Greco- 
Roman  world.  It  could  not  but  lend  a  stimulus  to  the 
growing  exaltation  of  Mary,  for  the  nascent  thought  of 
Christendom  could  not  escape  the  influence  of  ideas  and 
sentiments  which  so  fascinated  the  minds  of  its  converts. 
It  is  not  in  human  nature  that  a  religious  tradition  of  such 
power  should  wholly  lose  its  hold  under  a  changed  creed; 
rather  it  is  in  accordance  with  all  experience  that  the 
personalities  of  these  feminine  divinities  should  be  gradu- 
ally fused  with  the  ideal  figure  of  the  Virgin-Mother  of 
Christ.  It  is  plain  that  the  propagation  of  Christianity 
owed  much  to  its  ability  to  direct  into  a  new  channel  the 
current  of  earlier  devotion.  Traces  of  this  process  are 
visible  in  the  history  of  the  first  six  centuries,  as  when 
we  find  a  rite  picturing  the  death  and  rising  of  the  Cretan 
Aphrodite  reproduced  in  an  early  ritual  of  the  feast  of  the 
Assumption ;  and  the  blending  of  an  old  cult  with  the  new 


Catholicism  233 

in  a  period  of  transition  shows  itself  in  a  curious  rite  de- 
scribed by  Epiphanios  as  taking  place  in  the  Korion  at 
Alexandria.  On  the  night  of  the  5th  January  the  naked 
image  of  Kore,  with  the  sign  of  the  Cross  on  brow  and 
hands,  was  brought  up  from  a  crypt  and  carried  seven 
times  around  the  central  shrine  to  the  accompaniment  of 
flutes,  hymns,  and  dances,  and  at  this  hour,  the  votaries 
said,  Kore,  the  Virgin,  gave  birth  to  the  Eternal.  Such  a 
service,  neither  Christian  nor  purely  pagan,  seems  an 
attempt  to  adapt  an  old  ritual  of  Kore  to  Christian  use.1 

The  veneration  of  images — of  Christ,  the  Virgin  and  the 
saints — is  a  direct  inheritance  from  the  old  Greek  idolatry 
which  had  so  strong  a  hold  upon  the  religious  and  the 
artistic  sentiment,  and  by  way  of  spoiling  the  Egyptians 
many  an  old  statue  was  confiscated  by  the  Church  and 
made  to  serve  for  a  Christian  image.  There  exists  today 
in  what  once  was  Magna  Grecia  a  so-called  Madonna 
del  Granato  which  has  been  identified  with  the  "Hera, 
holding  a  Pomegranate"  of  Polycleitos,  and  in  an  epigram 
of  the  Anthology  a  S.  Luke  thus  disclaims  his  title:  "I 
am  Herakles,  the  triumphant  son  of  Zeus;  I  am  not  Luke, 
but  they  compel  me."  The  Black  Virgin  of  Le  Puy,  said 
to  be  the  work  of  the  prophet  Jeremiah,  gifted  with  a 
vision  of  the  unborn  Mary,  and  brought  from  Babylon 
by  a  King  of  France,  is  in  all  probability  an  image  of 
Druidic  times  witnessing  to  a  local  cult  to  which  the 
Church  gave  a  Christian  consecration. a  It  is  very  well  to 
say,  as  was  said  by  the  apologists  of  paganism,  that  the 
image  is  merely  a  symbol,  helpful  to  quicken  a  spiritual 
devotion,  but  the  view  that  prevailed  among  the  people, 
and  one  that  obtained  the  toleration  and  sometimes  the  en- 
couragement of  the  Church,  regarded  the  image  as  mira- 
culous, as  infused  with  divine  power,  if  not  itself  the  very 
divinity.  Such  was  the  belief  of  the  Greeks  who  scourged 

1  Farnell,  op.  tit.,  33-37  and  65-73.  a  Hanotaux,  Jeanne  Dare,  52. 


234  Catholicism 

the  image  of  Pan  when  food  was  scarce,  and  of  the  Breton 
smith  who  threatened  a  saint's  image  with  redhot  pincers 
to  persuade  it  to  heal  his  son. x  The  image  so  regarded 
seems  near  akin  to  the  fetish,  and  as  we  have  seen,  fetish- 
ism is  something  not  confined  to  primitive  religions. 

Similar  in  character  was  the  superstitious  reverence  for 
relics  which  prevailed  in  medieval  times,  when  the  faithful 
carried  them  as  amulets  against  ill  fortune,  and  the  wood  of 
the  true  Cross  could  be  found  in  shiploads  throughout 
Europe.  The  Peruvians  held  that  the  bones  of  their  priests 
gave  out  oracles,  and  while  the  Spanish  missionaries  con- 
tended vigorously  against  this  heathenish  delusion,  they 
deemed  it  heresy  to  doubt  the  miracle-working  powers  of 
the  bones  of  Christian  saints. a  Such  relics  were  the  most 
cherished  possessions  of  a  church  or  monastery.  At 
the  sanctuary  of  Le  Puy,  where  there  was  a  sacred  stone 
possessed  of  healing  powers — perhaps  also  taken  over 
from  the  Druids,  priceless  relics  were  exhibited  to  the 
adoring  contemplation  of  the  pilgrims,  among  whom  was 
the  pious  mother  of  Jeanne  Dare.  There  was  the  milk 
of  the  Blessed  Virgin,  the  veil  which  covered  her  new- 
born son,  wine  from  the  wedding  at  Cana,  manna  from  the 
desert  of  Israel's  wanderings,  and  many  other  treasures  of 
like  sort — treasures  at  least  to  the  clergy  who  exploited 
them. 

The  practice  of  Confession  appears  to  have  arisen 
within  the  early  monastic  orders  which  in  their  origin 
had  certain  marked  affinities  with  the  Pagan  religious 
fraternities,  and  in  these  Confession  had  place  in  the 
rites  of  initiation.  It  comes  down  from  the  times  when 
the  word  was  one  with  the  thing  itself  and  the  "speaking 
out"  of  sin  was  the  actual  purgation  of  it.  This  was  its 
meaning  in  the  Mexican  religion,  in  the  Samothracian 


Farnell,  op.  cit.,  40-44. 

Brinton,  Religions  of  Primitive  Peoples,  211-212. 


Catholicism  235 

Mysteries,  in  the  Babylonian  penitential  liturgies,  in  all 
of  which  it  was  part  of  the  ceremonial  of  purification. 
So  too  the  Churching  of  Women,  now  a  thanksgiving 
service,  descends  from  the  primitive  cathartic  ritual  that 
purged  away  the  dangerous  pollution  of  child-birth;  and 
the  Consecration  of  Churches  from  the  old-world  rites 
that  drove  away  demons  from  the  house.1  The  priest's 
extended  hand  in  blessing,  a  gesture  that  comes  down 
from  remote  antiquity,  derives  from  the  same  motive 
— to  ward  off  demonic  influences  from  the  congregation. 
The  cornelian  stone  in  a  bishop's  ring  was  an  amulet  for 
the  same  purpose,  for  the  cornelian  was  an  effective  pro- 
phylactic against  demons.  The  ring  itself  had  a  magic 
power  of  the  same  kind,  and  one  of  the  great  relics  that 
drew  Christian  pilgrims  to  Jerusalem  was  the  ring  of 
King  Solomon  by  which  he  compelled  the  demons  to 
serve  him  in  the  building  of  the  temple.  Again,  the 
hand  was  effective  in  conveying  beneficent  influences  as 
well  as  in  defense  against  the  maleficent.  Ordination 
and  Confirmation  have  their  origin  in  the  idea  common 
to  many  primitive  religions  that  a  man  can  transmit  a 
spiritual  virtue  to  others  through  his  hands  laid  on  their 
heads.  Thus  we  read  that  Moses  by  laying  his  hands 
on  Joshua  imparted  to  him  the  spirit  of  wisdom. 

The  doctrine  of  Apostolic  Succession  which  has  played 
so  important  a  part  in  Church,  history  has  an  origin  earlier 
than  Christianity.  It  was  a  very  old  Mediterranean 
tradition  that  the  priest  should  be  qualified  by  divine 
appointment  through  his  direct  descent  from  the  first 
missionary  who  instituted  the  cult  he  ministered.  Thus 
for  example  the  priests  of  Poseidon  traced  their  descent 
from  those  who  brought  his  worship  to  their  city  at  the 
time  of  its  foundation.  In  the  earlier  time  the  succession 
was  through  a  supposed  genealogical  descent;  this  was 

1  Farnell,  op.  cit.,  158-160. 


236  Catholicism 

afterward  refined  into  a  succession  of  spiritual  powers, 
which  however  could  only  be  maintained  by  a  continuity 
of  physical  contact — the  laying  on  of  hands. x 

Orientation  in  the  erection  of  churches  and  the  location 
of  the  altar  and  in  the  burial  of  the  dead,  declares  its 
derivation  from  the  sun-worship  it  was  found  necessary 
to  conciliate,  or  "baptise, "  and  from  the  contrasted  senti- 
ments associated  respectively  with  East  and  West  which 
everywhere  so  deeply  affected  the  primitive  mind.  * 

Incense,  which  still  rises  in  clouds  in  Christian  churches, 
was  an  element  in  the  ritual  of  Jews,  Greeks,  and  Romans, 
as  of  nearly  all  ancient  peoples  of  the  world.  The  Iliad 
and  the  Old  Testament  tell  us  the  intent  of  the  burning 
of  carcases  of  sheep  and  oxen:  it  is  that  the  savor  of  the 
offering  shall  go  up  in  smoke  to  heaven.  In  Eastern 
regions  the  burning  of  sandal-wood,  myrrh,  and  cassia  and 
compounds  of  various  fragrant  herbs  and  spices  served 
the  same  purpose,  and  among  the  American  aborigines 
the  smoke  from  tobacco  pipes.  The  underlying  idea  is  the 
conception  of  spirit  in  lower  animism  as  having  the  ethe- 
real nature  of  smoke  or  mist,  and  hence  offerings  reduced 
to  this  condition  are  more  readily  transmitted  to  the 
spiritual  beings  toward  whom  the  vapor  ascends.3 

The  sacrament  of  Unction  is  traceable  to  the  later 
fire-rituals  in  which  the  fat  of  the  victim,  as  well  as  the 
blood,  was  the  special  altar  food  of  the  gods.  Then,  as 
possessing  living  virtues  of  blessing  and  sanctification,  the 
sacrificial  fat  was  applied  to  the  persons  of  the  worshippers. 
Later,  when  the  agricultural  stage  succeeded  the  nomadic, 
the  use  of  animal  fats  for  unguents  gave  place  to  that 
of  vegetable  oils.4  The  anointing  of  Kings  became  an 
essential  feature  of  the  coronation  ceremony;  hospitality 

1  Farnell,  op.  cit.,  50.  a  Tylor,  Primitive  Culture,  ii,  421-429. 

3  Tylor,  op.  cit.,  ii,  382-386. 

*  W.  Robertson  Smith,  op.  cit.,  382-384. 


Catholicism  237 

required  one  to  honor  a  guest  by  anointing  his  head  (Luke 
vii,  46),  and  it  appears  to  have  been  an  early  Christian 
usage  to  anoint  the  sick  in  connection  with  prayers 
for  their  recovery  (James  v,  14).  This  practice  still  ob- 
tains to  some  extent  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church. 
In  a  letter  to  the  New  York  Times,  dated  November  16, 
1908,  a  priest  relates  how  a  woman  in  a  dying  condition, 
given  up  by  the  physicians,  was  miraculously  restored 
to  health  after  his  administration  of  the  sacrament  of 
unction.  He  concludes: 

The  purpose  of  this  is  to  remind  your  readers  that  the 
faith  and  practice  of  the  ancient  Church  is  still  followed  by 
clergy  of  the  Episcopal  Church,  and  that  God  blesses  the  use  of 
the  sacraments.  Many  clergymen  could  relate  instances  of 
recovery  following  the  use  of  the  sacrament  of  unction.  The 
Church  needs  no  new  weapon :  she  only  needs  to  use  in  humble 
faith  the  weapons  with  which  our  Blessed  Lord  equipped  her. 

This  may  be  submitted  without  comment  to  the  intelli- 
gence of  the  twentieth  century. 

j.     Creed  and  Dogma 

The  Creed  of  the  earliest  Church  was  comprised,  as  I 
have  said,  in  the  simple  confession  of  belief  that  Jesus 
was  the  Christ.  Unfortunate  as  this  identification  proved, 
yet  Jesus  was  not  wholly  lost  in  the  Messiah ;  the  memories 
of  his  life,  the  impression  of  his  captivating  personality 
could  not  be  effaced.  It  was  everything  for  the  new 
religion  that  its  illusory  messianic  faith  was  attached  to  the 
person  of  this  loved  Master,  that  the  anointed  King  of 
the  Jewish  hope,  with  all  his  God-given  power  and  author- 
ity, was  one  with  the  beautiful  soul  who  had  drawn  those 
pictures  of  the  spiritual  Kingdom  in  the  lakeside  villages 
of  Galilee.  From  the  first  to  this  day  Jesus  himself, 


238  Catholicism 

and  the  life  one  with  God  that  he  revealed,  have  been  the 
strength  of  historic  Christianity.  Faith  in  the  Christ 
might  give  hope  of  future  salvation ;  faith  in  Jesus  was  an 
impulse  to  the  higher  life.  The  spell  of  his  spirit  was  upon 
his  disciples;  it  moved  them  to  unite,  and  to  draw  others 
to  unite  with  them,  in  the  imitation  of  his  life.  It  was 
in  this,  it  was  in  men's  lives  as  they  tried  to  follow  his 
leading,  that  Christianity  first  found  expression.  When 
we  think  how  in  after  times  to  be  a  Christian  came  to  mean 
one  who  gave  assent  to  the  orthodox  dogmas,  there  is 
something  winning  in  the  simplicity  of  the  phrase  that 
names  the  faith  of  the  first  Christians :  ' '  that  way, ' '  a 
way  of  living.  Dean  Hatch  begins  his  Hibbert  Lectures 
by  calling  attention  to  the  contrast  between  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount  and  the  Nicene  Creed,  the  one  dealing  with 
conduct,  character,  the  spiritual  life,  the  right  relations 
of  men  to  the  heavenly  Father  and  to  one  another,  and 
the  other  laboring  to  formulate  a  metaphysical  theology 
the  mere  terms  of  which  would  have  been  unintelligible 
to  the  first  disciples.  And  he  goes  on  to  say  that  why 
such  a  Sermon  stands  in  the  forefront  of  the  teaching  of 
Jesus  and  such  a  Creed  in  the  forefront  of  fourth-century 
Christianity — or  how  the  centre  of  gravity  was  changed 
from  conduct  to  belief — is  a  problem  which  claims  in- 
vestigation. 

The  beginnings  of  Christian  theology  appear  in  the  New 
Testament  where  reflection  upon  the  person  and  ministry 
of  Jesus  issues  in  the  three  different  interpretations  of 
Paul,  the  Writer  to  the  Hebrews  and  the  fourth  Evangelist. 
These  speculations  were  not  at  once  followed  up,  for  in 
its  early  day  Christianity  gained  its  adherents  largely 
from  the  uneducated  people  of  the  lower  classes;  but  when 
it  reached  a  higher  stratum  of  society,  made  its  appeal 
to  thought  as  well  as  to  life  and  began  to  take  a  place 
in  the  intellectual  world,  then  under  Hellenic  influence  the 


Catholicism  239 

tendency  appeared  to  make  it  into  a  Philosophy  for  the 
cultivated,  as  under  influence  mainly  Asiatic  it  was  made 
into  a  Mystery  for  the  vulgar;  and  soon  there  were  signs  of 
danger  that  the  Christian  religion  would  evaporate  into 
metaphysic  or  theosophy.  It  was  to  meet  this  danger 
that  the  Church  fell  back  upon  the  theory,  invented  by 
Irenaeus,  that  a  uniform  doctrinal  tradition  had  always 
existed  in  the  apostolic  churches  which  must  be  deferred 
as  a  decisive  authority  in  matters  of  faith.  Of  this  sup- 
posed doctrinal  agreement, — which  was  afterward  defined 
in  the  formula  of  Vincentius,  "quod  ubique,  quod  semper, 
quod  ab  omnibus  creditum  est," — it  is  enough  to  say 
that  there  never  was  any  such  thing.  Up  to  the  middle 
of  the  second  century  an  unrestrained  freedom  of  specula- 
tion had  produced  various  incipient  theologies;  there  was 
no  definitive  authoritative  statement  of  Christian  truth. 
It  was  in  opposition  to  what  may  be  loosely  called  the 
Gnostic  movement,  and  in  particular  to  the  teachings  of 
Marcion,  that  about  the  year  150  such  a  statement  took 
shape  at  Rome.  At  an  early  day  the  simple  faith  in 
Jesus  the  Messiah  had  expanded  into  an  assertion  of  belief 
in  God  the  Father,  in  Jesus  Christ  His  Son,  and  in  the 
Holy  Spirit  who  dwells  in  the  hearts  of  the  godly.  This 
belief,  which  went  everywhere  with  Christianity,  un- 
doubtedly came  down  from  Paul  and  other  missionaries 
to  the  Gentiles ;  its  three  articles  were  accepted  in  a  general 
sense  as  postulates  of  the  new  religion,  but  they  remained 
unformulated  and  undeveloped.  Now, — amplified  by 
brief  statements  touching  the  birth  and  death  of  Jesus, 
his  resurrection  and  second  coming,  and  by  mention  of 
certain  gifts  of  divine  grace, — they  were  crystallised  out  of 
their  primitive  fluidity  into  a  uniform  Rule  of  Faith. 
Reducing  them  to  a  fixed  formula,  gathering  them  into  a 
creed,  clothing  that  creed  with  dogmatic  authority  and 
exacting  the  confession  of  it  from  candidates  for  baptism 


240  Catholicism 

— this  was  the  action  attributed  the  Apostles,  but  which 
in  fact  was  taken  now  for  the  first  time.  In  the  second 
century  the  fiction  that  all  church  institutions  were 
based  upon  apostolic  authority,  passed  for  an  unques- 
tionable fact :  the  bishops  were  successors  of  the  Apostles 
in  a  line  of  direct  descent ;  the  New  Testament  Canon  was 
a  collection  of  writings  of  apostolic  authorship;  and  the 
articles  of  faith  as  they  appeared  in  the  Roman  baptismal 
formula  had  been  handed  down  to  the  churches  from  the 
Apostles  themselves.  This  Roman  creed  was  termed  a 
"  symbol, "  or  password,  and  its  acknowledgment  was 
required  of  those  to  be  admitted  to  membership  in  the 
Church  as  a  guaranty  of  good  faith  on  their  part,  and 
as  a  barrier  against  the  intrusion  of  those  holding  tenets 
of  the  Gnostic  sects.  It  was  put  forth  as  an  authentic 
summary  of  the  apostolic  teaching.  Such  teaching, 
however,  had  been  that  of  many  different  persons,  and  this 
fact  allowed  of  tracing  doctrines  to  one  Apostle  or  an- 
other; thus  Marcion  built  on  Paul,  Basilides  on  a  special 
revelation  to  Matthias,  and  so  on.  It  was  therefore 
found  necessary  to  assume  an  apostolic  consensus,  on  the 
ground  that  the  Apostles  were  teachers  not  of  their  own 
ideas  but  of  the  doctrine  they  had  received  from  Jesus 
Christ.  This  was  to  make  the  Twelve  Disciples  authorities 
for  the  faith,  excluding  all  others,  even  the  Apostle  who 
was  afterwards  to  be  regarded  as  the  founder  of  Christian 
theology.  Paul  was  the  more  easily  ignored,  since,  as 
appears  from  the  later  New  Testament  writings,  his 
peculiar  doctrines  in  the  systematic  form  he  gave  to  them 
had  not  met  with  general  acceptance.  Shaped  in  the 
heat  of  controversy,  in  part  to  serve  as  weapons  of  defence, 
they  seem  to  have  faded  away  with  the  crisis  that  gave 
them  birth.  Breathing  the  spirit  of  a  rabbinical  theology, 
alien  and  outlandish  in  the  eyes  of  the  Greco-Roman 
world,  they  had  little  influence  on  the  Catholic  Church 


Catholicism  241 

until  canonisation  bestowed  upon  the  Pauline  Letters 
the  authority  of  Sacred  Scripture.  It  is  the  saying  of 
Harnack  that  in  the  second  century  but  one  Christian, 
Marcion,  took  the  trouble  to  understand  St.  Paul,  and 
he  misunderstood  him;  and  Professor  Moore  remarks: 
"It  has  been  doubted  whether  Paulinism,  that  extra- 
ordinary adjustment  of  Paul's  new  revelation  to  his 
Judaism,  ever  fully  commanded  any  mind  save  that  of 
the  author  of  the  system."1 

The  Catholic  Church  had  its  own  ideal  picture  of  the 
early  Christian  history,  and  one  that  bore  little  likeness 
to  the  reality.  Though  in  fact  the  Twelve  Disciples 
took  no  part  in  the  establishment  of  the  Gentile  churches, 
the  later  editors  of  the  Synoptics  represent  Jesus  as  en- 
trusting them  with  the  commission  to  teach  all  nations 
and  to  preach  the  Gospel  in  all  the  world.  Thus  the 
deposit  of  faith  is  held  to  have  been  given  by  the  Christ 
himself  into  the  hands  of  his  Apostles  and  by  them  to 
their  successors.  The  Twelve  are  thought  of  as  a  sacred 
college  responsible  for  the  conservation  of  Christian  truth, 
and  the  unanimity  of  this  college  of  Apostles  guarantees 
their  transmission  of  an  unchanging  faith  from  which 
dissent  is  not  to  be  allowed.  From  the  first  this  is  the 
view  insisted  on.  To  Irenaeus  it  is  beyond  doubt  that  the 
main  articles  of  the  baptismal  symbol  express  the  truth 
which  the  apostolic  churches  have  always  held  and  in 
which  all  believers  are  bound  to  agree;  and  the  fiery  Ter- 
tullian  would  have  Christians  hold  no  intercourse-  with 
those  who  will  not  acknowledge  the  Rule  of  Faith.  From 
this  time  adherence  to  a  statement  of  belief  becomes  the 
sign  and  seal  of  those  who  belong  to  the  Catholic  Church, 
and  it  is  this  which  distinguishes  them  from  those  who  do 
not.  Not  only  was  the  Creed  accepted  as  apostolic  in  its 
substance,  but  in  time  even  its  wording  came  to  be  ascribed 

1  Moore.     The  New  Testament  in  the  Christian  Church,  268. 
16 


242  Catholicism 

to  the  Apostles.  In  the  legend  of  its  authorship,  which 
may  be  traced  to  the  time  of  Ambrose,  and  perhaps  of 
Origen,  the  Creed  is  divided  into  twelve  articles;  one  of 
these  articles  is  said  to  have  been  contributed  by  each 
of  the  Apostles  in  a  session  held  soon  after  the  day  of 
Pentecost,  and  from  them  the  Creed  has  descended  to  the 
Church  through  the  continuous  succession  of  the  Episco- 
pate. Hence  an  authority  was  ascribed  to  it  even  higher 
than  that  of  the  canonical  writings  of  individual  Apostles, 
and  the  halo  of  glory  with  which  the  legend  encircled  it 
remained  undimmed  till  the  day  of  Erasmus. 

This  early  symbol  held  its  place  in  Rome  for  upwards  of 
three  centuries  when  it  was  supplanted  by  the  Creed 
known  as  the  Nicene,  and  fell  into  disuse.  At  this  time, 
under  Odovakar  and  the  Ostrogoths,  Arianism  was 
spreading  in  the  West,  and  to  arrest  its  progress  the 
Roman  Church  decided  to  accept  the  Eastern  Creed, 
which  was  crowned  with  the  prestige  of  authorisation 
by  two  ecumenical  Councils,  so  as  to  express  in  its  bap- 
tismal confession  its  disavowal  of  the  heresy.  Meantime 
the  old  Roman  Creed  had  made  its  way  into  the  Western 
provinces  towards  the  end  of  the  second  century,  and 
there  undergone  certain  modifications.  Its  practical 
tone  made  it  more  germane  to  the  Roman  temper  than  a 
Creed  which  registered  the  issues  of  speculative  disputa- 
tion, and  when  in  the  eighth  century  the  Church  of  Rome 
was  gaining  a  high  sense  of  its  own  importance,  and 
a  growing  alienation  was  declaring  itself  between  the 
East  and  the  West,  the  original  Creed  returned  to  Rome 
from  Southern  Gaul  with  some  few  additions  and  slight 
changes  in  wording  and  with  the  title  it  has  since  retained 
of  the  Apostles'  Creed.  The  so-called  Nicene  Creed  is 
touched  upon  in  a  later  section;  here  it  is  enough  to  say 
that  in  all  that  materially  distinguishes  it  from  the 
Apostles'  Creed  it  only  survives  as  the  relic  of  ancient 


Catholicism  243 

controversy  that  once  burned  fiercely,  whose  ashes  have 
long  been  cold.  It  is  the  Creed  of  the  Greek  and  Oriental 
churches,  in  which  the  Apostles'  Creed  is  unknown;  it 
stands  high  in  the  regard  of  Anglican  theologians  and 
retains  a  place  in  the  Anglican  liturgy,  yet  its  subtleties 
are  caviare  to  the  general,  and  we  may  venture  to  say 
that  in  its  somewhat  perfunctory  recitation  few  if  any 
trouble  to  give  thought  to  it.  The  Creed  that  has  held 
the  first  place  in  Western  Christendom  and  won  the 
widest  acceptance  from  the  laity  is  the  Gallo-Roman 
symbol  that  we  call  the  Apostles'  Creed. 

When  we  turn  to  examine  this  statement  of  the  Chris- 
tian faith  the  first  thing  that  strikes  us  is  the  number  and 
importance  of  the  matters  that  receive  no  mention.1 
We  do  not  find  the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  expressing 
its  firm  belief  in  the  great  ideas  and  principles  which 
possessed  the  mind  of  the  Master  and  so  potently  have 
influenced  the  world.  The  deep  truths  of  a  spiritual 
religion  which  his  Gospel  reveals  to  the  hearts  of  men  have 
no  place  among  the  articles  of  the  Catholic  faith.  His 
thoughts  and  words  and  deeds,  his  life  and  character — 
the  vital  seed  of  historic  Christianity — all  are  ignored 
as  pertaining  to  the  negligible  episode  of  his  mere  hu- 
manity, and  the  Creed  passes  with  one  step  from  his  birth 
to  his  death.  And  the  things  of  which  the  Creed  speaks 
may  well  seem  as  surprising  as  its  silence  concerning 
the  things  it  might  be  expected  to  assert,  for  they  are 
things  foreign  to  the  mind  of  him  who  is  called  the  Founder 
of  Christianity,  and  without  perceptible  relation  to  the 
religion  he  taught  by  word  and  life.2  The  first  article, 

1  "  No  one  conversant  with  the  history  of  early  Christianity  can  look 
closely  at  the  Apostles'  Creed  without  a  sense  of  wonder  both  at  the  things 
it  chooses  out  for  enumeration  and  as  well  at  the  things  which  it  omits  to 
state."     Moore,  op.  tit.,  296. 

2  On  this  point  see  the  clear  and  cogent  statements  of  Schmidt,  The 
Prophet  of  Nazareth,  293-294.     Pfleiderer  has  shown  how  the  Christological 


244  Catholicism 

for  instance,  names  the  Father,  yet  the  God  of  Catholi- 
cism is  not  the  God  of  Jesus.  Doubtless  he  too  believed 
that  God  made  heaven  and  earth,  but  that  was  not 
his  message  to  men.  This  Father  Almighty  is  not  the 
Father  of  whom  Jesus  tells,  with  whom  His  human 
children  live  in  filial  communion,  trustfully  dependent 
on  His  loving  care;  it  is  the  Father  of  the  "Only  Son," 
a  God  imaged  after  the  dualistic  conception  that  ruled 
all  philosophical  thought,  throned  in  the  solitude  of  in- 
finite majesty  and  withdrawn  from  the  hearts  of  men. 

Now  if  we  ask  how  it  is  that  the  Creed  is  only  concerned 
with  theological  propositions  (for  its  so-called  "facts" 
are  facts  only  for  theology) x  and  leaves  out  of  view  the 
truths  that  bear  upon  the  moral  and  religious  life — those 
that  held  chief  place  in  the  faith  of  earlier  Christians,  the 

articles  of  the  Creed  derive  from  the  mythical  ideas  of  the  old  religions,  as 
we  have  seen  above  in  the  case  of  the  Descent  into  Hell,  and  he  finds  in 
them  a  response  to  the  longings  that  possessed  the  souls  of  men.  "The 
demand  for  a  god  who  should  bring  alike  salvation  to  the  individual  in  the 
world  to  come  and  a  new  social  order  of  justice,  prosperity,  and  peace  was 
already  present  in  the  yearning  of  the  nations ;  whence  should  come  assurance 
of  its  realisation?  The  answer  was  given  in  Catholic  Christianity  which 
united  the  Messianic  King  of  an  earthly  Kingdom  of  God  with  the  con- 
queror of  death  and  giver  of  immortal  life  in  the  one  person  of  the  Son  of 
God  who  became  man,  died,  descended  into  hell,  rose  victoriously  from  the 
dead,  and  ascended  into  heaven,  sits  at  the  right  hand  of  God  and  will 
come  again  to  judge  the  living  and  the  dead.  All  these  articles  of  belief 
are  to  be  found  in  the  religious  cults  of  the  ancient  world  in  East  and 
West,  in  the  manifold  forms  of  Jewish  Apocalypse,  of  Oriental  mysticism 
and  gnosis,  of  Greek  speculation  and  Roman  Caesar-worship.  There  was 
wanting  only  the  single  subject  for  the  synthesis  of  these  predicates,  the 
nucleus  round  which  this  seething  mass  of  religious  ideas  could  crystallise 
into  a  new  faith  and  hope.  This  centre  of  unity  was  given  in  the  person 
of  Jesus,  the  Saviour  and  King  of  the  Jews,  who  by  his  cross  has  become 
Saviour  and  King  of  the  World."  The  Early  Christian  Conception  of 
Christ,  150. 

1  Pfleiderer  considers  that  the  term  theological  is  not  properly  applicable 
to  the  Creed:  "The  mythology  fixed  by  the  articles  of  faith  in  the  belief 
of  the  Christian  Church  nullified  all  theological  effort;  to  reconcile  them 
with  reason  was  not  possible  and  never  will  be." 


Catholicism  245 

answer  is  that  these  were  not  a  subject  of  controversy 
with  Greek  or  Jew,  nor  did  they  give  rise  to  any  serious 
difference  of  opinion  within  the  Church.  It  was  over 
the  personality  of  Jesus  Christ  that  animated  discussion 
arose,  and  when  the  latent  Docetism  of  the  Pauline  Chris- 
tology  came  into  the  open  and  was  carried  to  a  dangerous 
extreme,  the  Church  was  compelled  to  define  its  position 
in  relation  to  the  questions  in  dispute.  Thus  the  Rule 
of  Faith  was  shaped  by  the  exegencies  of  special  circum- 
stances. In  any  event  some  such  formulation  of  doctrine 
was  to  be  expected,  but  apart  from  Marcionites  and  other 
Gnostics  it  would  hardly  have  taken  just  the  turn  it  did 
take,  nor  have  been  couched  in  the  terms  that  have 
come  down  to  us.  "Tertullian's  contention  is  that  the 
Rule  is  not  only  apostolic  and  binding,  but  also  adequate 
—a  complete  representation  of  apostolic  teaching — that 
there  were  no  necessary  truths  outside  it."1  Yet  the 
truths  outside  it  are  those  of  real  moment  to  religion.  It 
seems  plain  that  a  declaration  touching  points  whereon 
men  differ,  which  ignores  a  larger  number  of  points  of 
greater  consequence  wherein  all  agree,  cannot  be  regarded 
as  an  adequate  statement  of  their  faith;  and  when  such  a 
declaration  assumes  a  controlling  prominence  as  if  it 
were  the  whole,  or  the  vitally  important  part,  of  religious 
truth,  and  the  bond  of  union  of  those  who  would  make 
religion  the  motive  power  of  their  life — then  it  misleads 
men's  minds.  All  appears  in  a  false  chiaroscuro ;  in  the 
light  concentrated  on  the  things  of  which  the  Creed  speaks 
the  things  as  to  which  it  is  silent  fall  into  shadow  and  are 
lost  to  sight. 

And  if  a  fragmentary  Creed  restricts  us  to  a  partial 
view  of  truth,  the  fixity  of  a  Creed  as  a  Rule  of  Faith 
hampers  and  checks  the  growth  of  the  religious  mind. 
In  view  of  this  consequence  the  superstitious  reverence 

1  Hatch,  Hibbert  Lectures,  318. 


246  Catholicism 

for  the  Catholic  Creeds  which  the  churches  inculcate  is 
something  to  be  deprecated.  The  assertion  that  the 
Creed  in  the  form  it  gradually  assumed  in  the  West,  or 
as  it  was  adopted  by  the  Council  of  Chalcedon,  is  the 
final  statement  of  Christian  truth,  never  to  be  taken  from 
or  added  to,  involves  the  singular  assumption  that  an 
active  theological  development  may  be  allowed  to  go  on 
for  some  centuries  and  then  it  is  to  be  suddenly  and 
forever  arrested.  Freedom  of  opinion,  the  utterance  of 
divergent  views,  is  legitimate  and  salutory  up  to  a  certain 
point,  and  then  all  venturing  to  think  for  oneself  becomes 
an  unpardonable  sin.  It  is  an  accepted  dictum  that 
"  fixity  of  interpretation  is  of  the  essence  of  the  Creeds  " ;  it 
seems  evident  that  on  the  contrary  flexibility  of  interpreta- 
tion is  essential  to  the  maintenance  of  these  ancient  docu- 
ments in  modern  use.  We  cannot,  if  we  would,  think 
with  the  mind  of  the  second  or  the  fourth  century ;  we  live 
in  a  different  world.  The  Creed  of  a  living  Church  must 
be  a  living  Creed,  and  to  live  is  to  grow.  The  Creeds, 
like  the  thirty-nine  Articles  of  the  English  Church,  are 
each  the  product  of  a  particular  time  and  register  the 
dominant  conceptions  of  that  time.  Like  the  English 
Articles  they  have  historic  value  as  witnessing  to  questions 
and  controversies  of  the  past,  but  in  so  far  as  they  originate 
in  temporary  conditions  they  have  no  claim  to  be  binding 
for  all  time.  This  claim,  however,  has  been  asserted  and 
enforced,  and  the  Christian  faith,  tied  down  to  formulas 
which  have  a  definite  historical  explanation,  has  naturally 
failed  to  keep  pace  with  the  general  progress  of  knowledge 
and  lost  touch  with  the  spirit  of  the  age.  The  theory 
underlying  the  claim  which  represents  that  faith  as  a 
sacred  deposit  "once  for  all  delivered"  and  to  be  pre- 
served intact — like  the  buried  talent  of  the  parable — 
finds  no  support  in  the  facts  given  in  the  history  of  the 
creed-making  ages.  Rather  we  find  in  the  Creeds  a 


Catholicism  247 

summary  of  the  results  of  long  continued  speculation 
and  discussion.  Their  conclusions  then,  like  the  conclu- 
sions of  natural  science,  were  in  the  nature  of  the  case 
provisional :  it  is  an  odd  mistake  to  suppose  that  the  un- 
changeableness  of  truth  attaches  to  men's  apprehensions 
and  definitions  of  truth.  If  religious  thought  involves 
the  necessity  of  adjusting  religious  ideas  to  all  the  other 
ideas  a  generation  has  come  to  possess,  so  that  its  religious 
consciousness  shall  be  brought  into  harmony  with  the 
other  organs  of  its  mental  life,  then  movement,  change, 
development  belong  to  the  very  conception  of  religious 
thought,  as  of  all  living  things.  Arrest  of  such  movement 
is  death,  and  dogma  is  dead  thought,  embalmed  in  the 
decrees  of  ecclesiastical  authorities,  and  made  binding 
upon  all,  not  because  its  truth  is  self  evident,  but  because 
the  authority  has  said  it  shall  be  binding.  Yet  after  all 
no  human  power  can  stay  the  advance  of  the  intelligence 
in  the  matter  of  religious  faith  more  than  in  other  matters, 
and  experience  proves  that  insistence  on  obsolete  doctrine 
only  works  disaster  to  religion.  If  spiritual  truths  come 
to  men  cast  in  the  mold  of  antiquated  forms — forms 
suited  to  the  genius  of  an  earlier  age  and  therefore  unsuited 
to  our  own — it  is  to  be  feared  they  will  not  trouble  to 
extract  the  kernel  from  the  husk,  the  eternal  from  the 
temporal,  but  will  throw  away  the  one  with  the  other :  and 
hence  those  liberal  Christians  are  the  true  conservatives 
who  seek  so  to  simplify  and  modernise  the  historic  faith 
as  to  save  religion  for  the  coming  generations. 

What  is  of  chief  moment,  however,  and  most  deserves 
attention  is  not  the  Creed  itself,  but  what  it  represents, 
the  whole  general  movement  which  is  indicated  and 
illustrated  by  the  formation  of  a  Creed,  a  movement 
from  which  the  Creed  springs  and  to  which  it  lends  ac- 
celeration. It  was  the  ossification  of  religion  into  the- 


248  Catholicism 

ology,  following  the  torpor  that  was  creeping  over  the 
faith  of  early  Christianity.  When  Christendom  began 
to  occupy  itself  persistently  with  things  at  once  inscru- 
table and  inessential,  to  the  neglect  of  matters  on  which 
Jesus  himself  laid  the  chief  stress,  it  resulted  that  God 
was  displaced  by  the  idea  of  God,  the  Being  to  be  loved 
and  trusted  by  a  conception  of  Him  that  must  be  accur- 
ately defined.  The  drawing  up  of  a  Creed  and  the 
paramount  importance  assigned  to  it  mark  the  time  when 
the  meaning  of  the  word  faith  was  transformed  from 
simple  trust  in  God  into  acceptance  of  a  series  of  meta- 
physical propositions.  In  the  Pauline  teaching  the  word 
faith  has  indeed  a  peculiar  sense,  but  it  is  always  faith 
in  Christ ;  it  is  a  personal  union,  not  the  holding  of  correct 
Christological  conceptions.  Now,  however,  it  was  not 
enough  that  faith  should  be  the  inspiration  of  a  life,  but 
the  idea  of  God  must  be  analysed  and  stated  with  minute 
exactness, — as  if  it  were  maintained  that  taking  food  is 
not  sufficient  for  one's  bodily  nourishment  unless  he  can 
pass  an  examination  in  physiology,  or  rather  as  if  to  pass 
the  examination  were  the  only  thing  necessary  to  physical 
life.  With  this  came  a  further  change,  and  faith  began 
to  signify  not  so  much  believing  as  what  one  believes; 
that  is,  it  was  not  faith  but  "the  faith"  that  was  insisted 
on.  Time  had  been  when  men  were  Christians  because 
their  hearts  were  touched  and  kindled  by  devotion  to  a 
person,  and  the  spirit  of  his  life  laid  hold  of  them  and 
drew  them  to  follow  in  his  steps ;  but  when  the  warmth  of 
this  enthusiasm  waned  and  the  spiritual  impulse  from  the 
influence  of  Jesus  gradually  spent  itself,  the  way  was 
open  for  the  rise  of  intellectualism  and  the  transfer  of 
interest  from  righteousness  to  orthodoxy.  And  that  the 
one  came  to  take  the  other's  place  has  stamped  itself  on 
language ;  miscreant  is  still  a  term  of  intense  moral  repro- 
bation, and  yet  it  only  means  wrong  believer.  It  is  the 


Catholicism  249 

Apostle's  remark  that  "the  Jews  require  a  sign  and  the 
Greeks  seek  after  wisdom,"  and  it  shows  an  accurate 
perception  of  racial  characteristics.  With  the  Greeks 
to  know  was  everything,  or  the  only  thing  worth  while. 
Christianity  attracted  Hellenic  converts  because  it  ap- 
peared to  them  in  the  light  of  a  new  philosophy,  and  this 
intellectual  interpretation,  this  character  of  a  revealed 
body  of  truth,  was  fastened  upon  Christianity  at  a  very 
early  day.  For  the  new  religion  found  itself  in  a  world 
where  metaphysical  conceptions  pervaded  the  whole 
mental  atmosphere  and  were  exercising  a  like  general 
influence  to  that  of  scientific  conceptions  in  our  day. 
It  was  a  decadent  age  of  thought.  The  sun  of  Greek 
philosophy  was  sinking  from  its  splendid  noonday  to 
its  setting  in  the  cloud-land  of  Neo-Platonism.  Original 
thinkers  were  succeeded  by  commentators  or  literateurs; 
the  great  schools  had  broken  into  wrangling  sects ;  pedants 
disputed  less  over  principles  than  over  the  forms  of  their 
expression,  and  the  quest  of  truth  degenerated  to  a  war 
of  words.  Yet  in  coming  down  from  the  heights  philoso- 
phy came  down  to  the  level  of  the  average  intelligence. 
In  its  literary  aspect  some  acquaintance  with  it  entered 
into  a  general  education.  What  it  lost  in  depth  of  signifi- 
cance it  gained  in  a  wider  hearing,  and  its  very  weakness 
served  to  give  it  vogue,  until  the  popular  mind  became 
saturated  with  its  ideas  and  dominated  by  its  methods. 

It  was  under  such  conditions  that  Christian  theology 
took  rise.  When  Christianity  was  assailed  as  a  barbarous 
atheism,  the  defence  of  the  faith  naturally  devolved  upon 
men  trained  in  Hellenic  culture  who  could  present  Chris- 
tian truths  in  a  manner  agreeable  to  the  philosophical 
cast  of  mind  prevalent  in  the  educated  world.  It  was 
not  so  much  that  Christianity  adopted  current  philosophi- 
cal doctrines  as  that  it  imbibed  the  philosophising  spirit 
and  took  the  bias  toward  intellectualism  of  that  acute 


250  Catholicism 

Hellenic  genius  which  "found  so  much  greater  pleasure 
in  thinking  cleverly  than  in  being  good."1  "What  Greek 
philosophy  did  was  to  contribute  to  the  building  up  of 
dogma,  of  that  system  of  thought  which  seeks  to  rational- 
ise, or  to  explain  the  ultimate  fact  of  the  divine  nature — 
the  ground  of  the  evangelical  idea  set  forth  by  Jesus; 
which,  just  because  it  is  an  ultimate  fact,  admits  of  no 
explanation,  but  only  of  being  verified,  and  that  not  by 
philosophical  speculation  but  by  the  personal  experience 
of  those  who  surrender  themselves  to  the  influence  of  the 
idea."2  The  Apologists,  admitting  philosophy  to  have 
been  a  Gentile  revelation,  undertook  to  show  that  Chris- 
tianity was  the  only  true  philosophy,  and  Justin  claims 
all  true  philosophers  for  Christians.  Philosophy,  it  was 
believed,  held  the  sum  of  knowledge,  and  by  this  path 
was  the  approach  to  Christianity;  and  since  men  can 
only  reason  with  the  conceptions  and  the  categories  they 
possess,  the  philosophers  turned  Christian  who  began  to 
systematise  the  content  of  their  new  religion  brought 
to  its  statement  in  terms  of  thought  the  primary  concep- 
tions, the  method  and  the  terminology  which  had  been 
developed  in  the  course  of  Greek  speculation,  and  these 
formed  the  mold  in  which  Christian  theology  was  cast. 3 
Under  the  conditions  of  the  time  Christianity  could  not 
resist  nor  escape  the  intellectual  influence  that  shaped  its 
course.  The  Greeks  long  devoted  to  the  pursuit  of  know- 
ledge, highly  trained  in  habits  of  reasoning,  could  but 
conceive  the  Christian  revelation  after  the  manner 
natural  to  the  working  of  their  minds,  and  endeavor 

1  Moore,  op.  cit.,  287.  a  Mackintosh,  op.  cit.,  204. 

3  "Greece  provided  Christianity  with  the  weapons  of  culture  which 
enabled  it  to  subdue  the  minds  of  its  opponents,  but  at  the  same  time  it 
did  much  to  determine  the  main  bias  and  direction  of  the  religious  conscious- 
ness which  was  established  by  its  means;  it  gave  its  own  form  to  the  life 
and  doctrine  of  the  Church."  E.  Caird,  The  Evolution  of  Theology  in  the 
Greek  Philosophers,  ii,  369. 


Catholicism  251 

to  adjust  it  to  their  philosophical  scheme  of  truth  accord- 
ing to  the  established  forms  of  thought  and  methods  of 
procedure.  The  endeavor  was  but  too  successful.  The 
Greek  insistence  upon  knowledge  as  the  chief  concern  of 
man  took  hold  of  the  Christian  mind,  and  it  was  not  long 
before  the  Church  came  to  share  the  Greek  conviction 
that  knowledge  of  truth  was  the  way  of  salvation.  St. 
Paul's  preaching  had  claimed  authority  on  grounds  not 
recognised  by  philosophy.  It  was  not  with  enticing 
words  of  men's  wisdom,  but  in  demonstration  of  the 
spirit  and  of  power,  for  the  wisdom  of  the  world,  he  de- 
clared, was  foolishness  with  God;  yet  within  a  century 
and  a  half  this  wisdom  had  so  taken  possession  of  Chris- 
tianity that  Tertullian  could  argue  for  its  toleration  on  the 
ground  that  it  too  was  a  philosophy  like  another,  and  a 
school  for  the  study  of  philosophic  Christianity  was 
established  at  Alexandria  under  the  teaching  of  Clement 
and  Origen.  With  them  Christianity  is  the  culmination 
of  philosophy  and  includes  all  truth;  philosophy  is  the 
preparatory  study.  It  is  their  assertion  that  no  one 
could  be  truly  pious  who  did  not  philosophise,  and  that 
the  unlearned  could  not  have  knowledge  of  Christianity.1 
The  issue  of  the  Gnostic  controversy  is  supposed  to  be  a 
triumph  for  Christianity,  and  such  it  may  appear  if  we 
look  only  to  the  repudiation  of  the  peculiar  vagaries  of 
an  extravagant  transcendentalism.  But  there  was  more 
than  this  at  stake;  the  question  was  one  of  essential 
principles.  The  Church  confronted  a  deliberate  attempt 
to  transform  the  faith  into  a  gnosis.2  This  transformation 
was  the  real  peril  that  threatened  Christianity,  not  the 

1  Cf.  Taylor,  The  Classical  Heritage  of  the  Middle  Ages,  110-113. 

a  "The  Gnostics  were  the  archetypes  of  heresy,  because  they  were  the 
first  who  in  attempting  to  rationalise  Christianity  endangered  its  founda- 
tions, transferring  it  from  the  domain  of  feeling  to  that  of  speculation,  and 
substituting  intellectual  mysticism  for  its  simple  requirements  of  faith  and 
moral  purity."  Mackay,  The  Rise  and  Progress  of  Christianity,  129. 


252  Catholicism 

kind  of  gnosis  it  was  to  become.  Yet  instead  of  contend- 
ing for  the  faith, — for  Christianity  as  a  way  of  life  and 
not  a  system  of  thought, — instead  of  meeting  the  enemy 
on  this  battle  ground  of  principle,  the  Christian  leaders 
abandoned  the  principle  and  concentrated  their  attack 
upon  a  minor  issue,  the  falsity  of  Gnostic  theology.  They 
fought  Gnosticism  with  its  own  weapons.  They  formu- 
lated a  body  of  doctrine  in  opposition  to  the  doctrine 
of  the  Gnostics,  and  when  they  succeeded  in  imposing 
this  upon  the  churches  heretical  Gnosticism  had  indeed 
been  overthrown,  but  an  orthodox  Gnosticism  had  gained 
supreme  authority  unshaken  down  to  our  own  day.1 
Clement  and  Origen  recognised  two  classes  of  Christians, 
those  who  lived  by  simple  faith  and  those  who  reached 
a  further  perfection,  the  true  knowers  (yvwaTi/coi).  It 
was  a  division  on  the  ground  of  intellectual  attainment 
answering  to  that  which  introduced  the  twofold  morality 
of  a  later  day.  When  it  became  the  accepted  view  that 
faith  was  something  rudimentary  and  imperfect  until 
developed  into  gnosis,  the  conquered  was  conqueror  and 
the  Gnostic  principle  was  established  that  Christianity 
is  essentially  philosophy.  Such  a  Christianity  is  some- 
thing different  from  the  Gospel  of  Jesus.  That  is  a  mes- 
sage not  to  the  intellect,  but  to  the  heart  and  conscience  of 
mankind.  It  brings  to  us  ideals  rather  than  ideas,  and 
its  teachings  are  as  easily  apprehensible  as  they  are  search- 
ing and  profound.  And  so  while  a  philosophy  of  religion 
may  have  its  pertinence  and  value,  a  philosophy  of  the 
Gospel — or  what  has  been  called  ' '  an  explicit  formulation 

1  "The  Gnostic  speculations  were  rejected,  and  the  ecclesiastical  thereby 
the  more  securely  established.  But  are  the  latter  a  great  deal  better  or 
more  intelligent?"  Wernle,  op.  cit.,  219. 

A  Christian  Gnosticism,  an  adoption  of  Gnostic  ideas,  appears  plainly 
in  the  deutero-Pauline  writings  and  to  some  extent  in  the  fourth  gospel. 
A  full  treatment  of  this  subject  may  be  found  in  Pfleiderer's  Primitive 
Christianity,  vol.  iii. 


Catholicism  253 

of  the  rational  system  already  implicit  in  the  intuition  of 
Jesus" — seems  at  once  superfluous  and  incongruous. 

When  the  Christian  religion  became  a  system  of  the- 
logy  it  followed  that  its  adherents  were  bound  to  sub- 
scribe to  that  system.  At  first  the  realm  of  Christian 
truth  was  open  to  the  freest  speculation,  but  it  was  not 
long  before  authority  turned  doctrine  into  dogma,  a 
change  of  which  the  results  have  always  been  disastrous. 
Theological  doctrine  is  the  product  of  theorising  about 
the  nature  of  God,  grace  and  free  will,  the  plan  of  salva- 
tion, and  other  such  topics,  under  the  controlling  influence 
of  the  ideas  and  modes  of  thought  prevalent  at  a  given 
time.  When  such  thinking  is  left  free  to  take  its  course 
it  will  keep  pace  with  the  progressive  movement  of  general 
culture,  and  the  development  of  doctrine  will  be  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  increasing  knowledge,  the  wider  outlook 
and  clearer  insight  that  the  years  bring  to  the  minds  of 
men.  It  is  obvious  that  the  necessary  condition  of  the 
progress  of  doctrine  is  freedom  of  thought,  and  when 
that  is  put  under  restraint  and  the  fluid  doctrine  is  crys- 
tallised into  authoritative  dogma,  theology  is  brought 
to  a  standstill  and  left  behind  on  the  line  of  march;  its 
doctrines,  in  harmony  with  the  spirit  of  the  times  of  their 
formation,  lose  hold  of  later  generations,  and  then  reli- 
gion, which  has  been  tied  to  the  obsolete  theology,  will  be 
neglected  or  rejected  until  it  shall  shake  off  the  burden 
of  that  connection. 

Yet  such  a  system  of  authoritative  dogma  was  the 
inevitable  issue  of  the  movement  to  intellectualise  the 
Christian  religion  which  took  rise  within  the  Catholic 
Church.  First  there  was  an  effort  at  precise  definition 
of  the  conceptions  underlying  the  faith;  then  these,  and 
the  logical  deductions  from  them,  must  be  gathered  into  a 
system ;  and  finally  this  body  of  doctrine  must  be  invested 
with  the  authority  of  divine  truth.  For  as  the  speculative 


254  Catholicism 

interest  became  supreme  the  distinction  disappeared 
between  the  traditional  primary  beliefs  and  the  newer 
doctrines  concerning  them,  and  it  came  to  be  as  important 
to  hold  the  one  as  the  other.  And  when  the  doctrine  of 
the  incarnate  Logos  had  gained  prevalence,  Neo-Platonic 
speculation  found  entrance  into  the  Creed  itself,  and 
as  Harnack  says,  "the  baptismal  confession  became  a 
compendium  of  scientific  dogmatics."  The  Letter  of 
the  Eastern  bishops  to  Paul  of  Samosata  purports  to  set 
forth  "the  faith  which  we  received  from  the  beginning, 
having  been  transmitted  to  the  Catholic  Church  and 
proclaimed  up  to  our  day  by  the  successors  of  the  blessed 
Apostles  who  were  eye-witnesses  and  assistants  of  the 
Logos."  And  what  they  proceed  to  define  as  this  faith 
is  nothing  other  than  the  contemporary  metaphysical 
theology.1  Thus  at  last  the  essentials  of  Christian  faith 
were  fixed  in  expressions  of  opinion  regarding  matters  so 
remote  as  to  be  out  of  all  relation  to  the  Christian  life, 
and  then  that  which  should  have  bound  all  Christians 
together  became  a  breeder  of  division  and  discord.2 


1  "  It  would  be  interesting  to  point  out  how  the  formulation  of  belief, 
when  pushed  beyond  the  range  of  man's  inner  experience,  becomes  unreal 
and  hence  tends  to  evoke  formalism  complemented  by  superstition.  Chris- 
tianity has  been  affected  by  two  kinds  of  superstition  which  present  an- 
alogies and  are  not  unrelated  in  source.  The  one  regards  the  magic-mystical 
effect  of  the  outward  act — eating  of  bread,  or  baptism,  or  penance  done — a 
superstition  opposed  to  the  spiritual  regeneration  set  forth  by  Christ.  The 
other  attaches  a  quasi-magical  efficiency  to  the  mind's  accurate  acceptance 
of  metaphysical  propositions.  Equally  with  the  first  error  it  ignores  the 
actual  condition  and  the  needful  regeneration  of  the  soul."  Taylor,  op. 
cit.,  1 20. 

a"Had  no  more  ever  been  imposed  than  what  Christ  imposed — the 
Kingdom,  the  Way,  the  Life;  had  faith  in  the  living  Christ  not  been  con- 
founded with  assent  to  Christological  speculations,  the  whole  world  might 
have  been  Christian  by  this  time.  But  let  hell  be  the  penalty  for  theo- 
logical error,  let  men's  natural  intolerance  receive  a  divine  consecration 
and  blessing,  and  the  result  can  only  be  what  it  has  been — hatred,  persecu- 
tion, division,  and  subdivision."  G.  Tyrrell,  Medievalism,  118. 


Catholicism  255 

For  the  orthodox  theology  took  form  under  pressure 
of  that  principle  of  authority  which  was  constitutive 
of  the  ecclesiastical  system.  There  was  ground  for  alarm 
in  the  philosophical  activity  so  widely  prevalent,  when 
many  men  of  many  minds  were  giving  utterance  to  the 
most  discordant  theories,  and  it  was  felt  that  measures 
must  be  taken  to  check  independent  speculation  and 
subordinate  it  to  a  general  control.  It  had  always  been 
agreed  that  the  traditional  apostolic  doctrine  required 
a  traditional  interpretation,  and  now  the  principle  of  this 
denial  of  private  interpretation  was  extended  to  the  new 
theology.  That  field  could  no  longer  be  left  open  to  ir- 
responsible theorising;  the  Christian  faith  must  be  de- 
termined by  authority.  This  authority  was  vested  in 
meetings  of  bishops  where  points  of  doctrine  were  debated 
and  the  opinion  that  gained  a  majority  vote  was  held  to 
be  finally  decisive.  We  must  not  lose  sight  of  these  two 
facts,  that  the  orthodox  doctrines  are  nothing  other  than 
the  speculative  theories  of  certain  men,  and  that  their 
sole  claim  to  our  acquiescence  comes  from  having  the 
endorsement  of  a  majority  of  a  meeting. 

All  such  speculations  are  simply  personal  convictions. 
The  belief  that  metaphysical  theology  is  more  than  this  is  the 
chief  bequest  of  Greece  to  religious  thought,  and  it  has  been  a 
damnosa  hereditas.  It  has  given  to  later  Christianity  that 
part  of  it  which  is  doomed  to  perish,  and  yet  while  it  lives 
holds  the  key  of  the  prison-house  of  many  souls.1 

Again,  that  the  majority  shall  decide  is  a  practical  rule 
for  the  conduct  of  political  affairs,  but  it  seems  absurdly 
inapplicable  to  the  ascertainment  of  spiritual  truth  or  the 
guidance  of  religious  thought.  It  is  the  average  man 
that  constitutes  any  majority,  and  in  things  belonging 

1  Hatch,  Hibbert  Lectures,  138. 


256  Catholicism 

to  the  higher  reaches  of  mind  the  view  of  the  average 
man  is  not  very  clear  nor  his  insight  profound — else 
he  would  not  be  the  average  man.  It  is  rather  the  excep- 
tional man,  the  genius,  the  seer,  to  whom  we  look,  if  to 
any  human  helper,  for  light  and  leading  on  the  steep 
path  to  truth  which  our  own  feet  must  tread — our  own 
feet,  for  truth,  like  righteousness,  must  be  won  by  our- 
selves and  is  not  to  be  received  from  the  hands  of  another. 
The  bishops,  however,  proceeded  without  hesitation. 
The  approved  opinions  were  stamped  as  a  body  of  truth, 
and  as  faith  in  its  original  sense  had  been  required  of  the 
first  converts,  so  in  its  new  sense  it  was  imposed  as  an 
obligation  upon  all,  and  the  demand  for  assent  to  the 
prevailing  opinion  grew  more  and  more  stringent.  Hence 
those  who  clung  to  the  opinion  of  the  minority  became 
heretics  and  schismatics,  to  be  excluded  from  the  Church. 
It  often  happened  that  the  condemned  doctrine  had 
formally  been  that  of  a  majority,  for  when  primitive  views 
were  becoming  antiquated  that  was  pronounced  heresy 
which  in  the  unsettled  condition  of  belief,  before  orthodoxy 
was  clearly  defined,  had  been  the  prevalent  opinion. 
Such  opinions  were  not  willingly  surrendered,  and  the 
controversies  ensuing  were  bitter  and  violent.  There  was 
a  free  exchange  of  anathemas,  and  for  generations  the 
air  was  sulphurous  with  volanic  outbursts  of  the  odium 
iheologicum.  Dr.  Hatch  tells  us  that  he  must  refrain 
from  quoting  "the  torrents  of  abuse  which  one  saint 
poured  upon  another  because  one  assented  to  the  specula- 
tions of  a  majority  and  the  other  had  speculations  of 
his  own."  Theological  uniformity,  if  everywhere  spon- 
taneously arising,  might  or  might  not  be  regarded  as  a 
blessed  thing ;  but  brought  about  by  coercion,  by  silencing 
differences  under  pains  and  penalties,  it  has  manifestly 
no  significance  or  value.  It  was  the  misfortune  of  the 
early  Church  to  lose  sight  of  an  essential  distinction: 


Catholicism  257 

religion  is  no  more  a  philosophy  than  art  is  a  science.1 
Philosophy  has  indeed  a  great  sphere  of  its  own ;  the  specu- 
lative dialectic  deals  not  with  abstractions  but  brings 
us  to  the  knowledge  of  Reality.  Yet  its  field  is  limited; 
it  is  strictly  the  activity  of  the  intellect.  Novalis  de- 
clared: "Philosophy  can  bake  no  bread,  but  she  can 
give  us  God,  Freedom,  and  Immortality."  It  seems  a 
scarcely  accurate  statement.  Philosophy  can  give  us  the 
knowledge  of  God,  the  idea  of  Freedom,  the  conviction  of 
Immortality;  not  those  realities  themselves.  It  is  religion 
that  brings  us  to  God  Himself,  in  the  religious  life  is  the 
realisation  of  Freedom,  and  immortality  belonging  to  the 
spirit  which  we  are  is  the  gift  of  the  Spirit  whose  we  are, 
and  not  of  Philosophy.  Theology  has  been  called  the 
piety  of  the  intellect,  but  that  is  not  all  of  piety.  Religion 
is  the  life  of  the  whole  man,  and  its  deeper  roots  are  in 
the  affections  and  the  will.  To  make  it  the  affair  of  the 
intellect  alone  is  not  merely  to  confine  it  to  its  narrowest 
channel — to  reduce  it  to  its  lowest  terms,  but  to  change 
its  essential  nature.  And  it  was  not  merely  that  the 
Christian  religion  was  changed  from  a  principle  of  life 
into  a  metaphysical  creed:  it  makes  the  matter  worse 
that  the  creators  of  Christian  theology  were  not  original 
thinkers  and  could  only  adopt  and  adapt  to  their  uses  a 
decadent  and  defective  philosophy,  the  incoherent  Greco- 
Oriental  eclecticism  current  in  their  day;  and  hence  the 
attempt  of  Origen  to  construct  a  systematic  philosophy  of 
Christianity  issued  in  a  jumble  of  inconsistencies  based 

x"  There  is  a  fulness  and  concreteness  in  the  immediate  religious 
consciousness  which  defies  all  attempt  at  embodiment  in  abstract  proposi- 
tions. It  is  fatal  to  identify  religion  and  theology,  for  such  an  identifica- 
tion will  destroy  the  warm  and  breathing  intensity  of  faith,  substituting 
a  creed  for  a  life.  Religion  and  theology  have  each  their  own  form  and 
their  own  law,  and  nothing  but  confusion  can  result  from  fusing  together 
things  so  disparate  in  their  nature."  Watson,  The  Philosophical  Basis  of 
Religion,  15. 


258  Catholicism 

upon  incompatible  data  which  it  would  seem  neither  a 
philosopher  nor  a  Christian  could  find  acceptable.  To 
this  it  came :  the  life  of  faith,  of  trust  in  God  and  loyalty 
to  Christ,  was  displaced  by  intellectual  acceptance  of 
a  system  of  philosophic  doctrine  bearing  the  name  of 
Christian,  but  in  spirit  and  in  method  and  largely  in  sub- 
stance borrowed  from  the  heathen ;  and  upon  this  accept- 
ance salvation  depended.  Not  the  practice  of  virtue  but 
the  profession  of  the  faith  was  the  essential  thing,  for  sin 
was  pardonable,  but  not  error.  This  metamorphosis  of  a 
religion  which  claimed  Jesus  for  its  founder  is  the  one 
great  triumphant  Christian  heresy,  none  the  less  a  heresy 
though  it  arrogates  to  itself  the  name  of  orthodoxy  and 
brands  as  heretical  any  departure  from  the  standards  it 
has  itself  set  up  and  pronounced  authoritative. 

The  spirit  of  the  Gospel  speaks  in  the  words  an  Evan- 
gelist puts  into  the  mouth  of  Jesus:  "By  this  shall  all 
men  know  that  ye  are  my  disciples  if  ye  have  love  one  to 
another";  but  with  the  enforcement  of  a  uniform  belief 
as  the  condition  of  Church  membership,  agreement  in 
opinion  became  the  bond  of  Christian  unity,  as  it  was 
in  the  philosophical  schools.  In  earlier  times  a  welcome 
was  extended  to  all  traveling  brethren  of  good  character ; 
now  the  moral  was  superseded  by  a  credal  test.  A  circular 
letter  issued  by  a  church  to  its  members  on  the  eve  of  a 
journey  furnished  them  with  a  certificate  of  orthodoxy 
which  served  as  a  passport  to  hospitality, — except  where 
owing  to  differences  on  points  of  doctrine  still  unsettled, 
the  churches  would  not  receive  each  other's  letters.  An 
early  writer  could  declare  exultantly  that  faith  was  the 
victory  that  overcame  the  world,  but  faith  in  its  new 
acceptation  gave  to  the  world  the  victory.  Christianity 
had  aimed  to  leaven  the  world  with  the  spirit  of  a  new 
life,  and  had  itself  become  permeated  by  the  spirit  of  the 
world.  The  world  was  changed  perhaps,  but  Christianity 


Catholicism  259 

was  changed  as  well.  When  intellectual  assent  rather 
than  moral  earnestness  was  taken  to  be  the  basis  of 
religious  society,  the  net  of  the  Church  was  cast  into  the 
sea  and  gathered  every  kind.  "Its  members  were  of  the 
world,  basing  their  conduct  on  the  current  maxims  of 
society,  held  together  by  the  loose  bond  of  a  common 
name  and  of  a  creed  they  did  not  understand."1  And 
when  that  Creed  was  made  the  answer  to  the  question, 
What  is  Christianity  ?  an  astute  hierarchy  sucked  thereout 
no  small  advantage.  It  was  not  by  preaching  the  love 
of  God  and  the  love  of  man,  but  by  the  enforcing  of  credal 
conformity  that  it  built  up  its  power,  and  history  has  no 
darker  page  than  that  which  records  the  fierce  persecution 
of  dissident  belief  from  the  day  of  the  Albigenses  to  that 
of  the  Huguenots.2 

4.     The  Canon 

Along  with  the  formulation  of  the  Creed,  and  the 
outcome  of  similar  ecclesiastical  necessities,  went  the  slow 
process  of  establishing  a  Canon  of  Christian  Scripture. 
Up  to  the  middle  of  the  second  century  the  writings  com- 
prised in  our  New  Testament  were  looked  upon  as  part 
of  a  more  or  less  fugitive  literature,  the  natural  product 
of  a  religious  movement.  Their  incidental  and  occasional 
character  is  marked,  with  scarcely  an  exception,  upon 
the  face  of  the  writings  themselves.  The  Letters  of 
Paul  contain  the  teaching,  the  counsel,  the  exhortation 
which  he  was  not  able  to  deliver  in  person,  and  it  is  likely 
if  he  could  have  been  everywhere  present  we  should 
have  had  no  Letters  at  all.  They  are  concerned  with  the 

1  Hatch,  Hibbert  Lectures^  349. 

3  If  one  would  know  something  of  the  later  crimes  against  humanity 
in  the  name  of  religion,  he  may  learn  it  from  that  terrible  indictment  of 
the  Gallican  Church,  Lanfrey's  L'Eglise  et  Us  Philosophes  du  i8me 
Sitcle. 


260  Catholicism 

actual  situation  in  a  given  community,  and  had  that 
been  other  than  it  was  the  Letters  would  be  different  from 
what  they  are.  The  Gospels  are  compilations  of  an  oral 
tradition,  and  of  Memoranda  of  that  tradition,  which 
conserved  the  personal  testimony  of  apostolic  men,  and 
it  is  when  these  men  are  passing  away  that  written  gospels 
begin  to  appear.  The  earliest  of  them  took  shape  from 
the  tradition  as  it  was  current  in  different  communities, 
and  exhibits  the  variety  of  that  tradition.  The  various 
regions  of  the  Empire  had  their  own  gospels,  the  letters 
remained  the  property  of  the  several  churches  to  which 
they  were  addressed,  and  nowhere  was  there  an  attempt 
to  make  any  collection  of  the  scattered  Christian  literature, 
so  much  of  which  is  lost  to  us.  That  literature  was  ranked, 
so  to  speak,  on  the  same  plane:  each  writing  stood  on  its 
own  merits,  or  was  accepted  because  it  was  found  ac- 
ceptable. There  was  no  distinction  between  the  books 
afterwards  stamped  as  canonical  and  others  of  the  same 
sort — gospels,  epistles,  acts,  revelations — and  some  of 
these  latter  were  read  in  the  public  services  in  preference 
to  some  of  the  former.  The  author  of  the  third  gospel 
lays  claim  to  no  divine  inspiration,  but  simply  says  that 
he  like  many  others  has  thought  it  well  to  draw  up  a 
narrative  of  events  reported  by  eye-witnesses,  and  to 
that  end  has  traced  the  course  of  things  accurately  from 
the  first.  Of  this  and  the  fourth  gospel  Julicher  remarks: 
"If  these  writings  had  not  come  down  to  us  as  parts  of 
the  New  Testament  no  one  would  be  aware  of  any  differ- 
ence between  them  and  other  literary  productions  of 
those  times."1  To  paraphrase  from  Professor  Moore:2 
If  we  would  understand  the  way  in  which  the  books  of  the 
New  Testament  appeared  to  men  for  a  century  after  the 
death  of  Paul,  we  must  divest  ourselves  altogether  of 

1  Julicher,  An  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament,  469. 

3  Moore,  The  New  Testament  in  the  Christian  Church,  43-44. 


Catholicism  261 

the  notion  of  a  scriptural  canon.  We  must  realise  that  we 
have  gone  back  to  the  time  when  men  loved  the  oral 
testimony  to  the  grace  and  truth  of  Jesus  better  than  the 
written  substitute ;  when  there  were  many  more  collections 
of  Jesus'  sayings  and  narratives  of  his  doings  than  our 
four  gospels,  and  when  some  of  these  were  in  many  places 
preferred  to  some  of  the  four,  and  in  other  places  not  all 
of  the  four  were  known.  It  was  a  time  when  there  were 
many  more  Letters  of  apostolic  men  than  those  we  have 
in  the  New  Testament,  when  the  word  apostle  had  not 
yet  lost  a  sense  which  made  the  glorious  company  of  the 
apostles  far  larger  than  that  of  the  Twelve,  for  the  name 
applied  to  any  man  who  bore  Christ's  message  to  the  world ; 
a  time  when  prophets  still  claimed  inspiration  of  the  Holy 
Ghost  and  spoke  to  the  churches  as  Paul  tells  us  they 
spoke  in  Corinth,  and  when  one  Apocalypse  at  least, 
much  more  Christian  than  our  Revelation,  was  as  much 
loved  where  men  loved  that  kind  of  thing  at  all,  so  that 
where  it  was  rejected  our  Apocalypse  was  rejected  too. 

The  Canon  then  is  a  selection  from  this  mass  of  early 
Christian  literature  invested  with  the  character  of  "  Scrip- 
ture. ' '  Here  it  may  be  well  to  define.  The  term  Scripture 
designates  such  writings  as  are  believed  to  be  "inspired" 
— that  is,  to  be  the  fruit  of  a  divine  authorship  concurrent 
with  the  human — and  therefore  claim  the  highest  authority 
and  command  the  highest  reverence.  The  term  Canon 
— originally  a  cane,  or  reed,  for  drawing  a  straight  line- 
signifies  a  line  of  demarcation,  and  hence  a  rule,  a  stand- 
ard. Applied  to  Scripture  it  means  the  rule  which  deter- 
mines the  selecting  and  collecting  of  the  Sacred  Books,  and 
then  the  collection  itself  comes  to  be  called  the  Canon, 
because  canonical  books  are  those  which  regulate  the 
teaching  of  the  Church.  This  idea  of  a  Canon  of  inspired 
writings  was  taken  over  from  Judaism.  For  generations 
the  Rabbis  had  been  debating  as  to  the  title  of  certain 


262  Catholicism 

books  of  Jewish  literature  to  be  classed  with  sacred 
Scripture,  and  the  same  question  was  discussed  with  equal 
interest  by  the  Christian  doctors,  to  whom  it  was  one  of 
greater  difficulty  since  it  was  complicated  by  the  general 
use  of  the  Septuagint,  which  differed  in  many  respects 
from  the  Hebrew  original,  and  contained  writings  not 
embraced  in  the  Hebrew  Canon.  As  we  have  seen,  the 
Church  inherited  the  Jewish  Scriptures — which  Paul  had 
declared  to  be  the  ' '  Oracles  of  God ' ' — and  until  after  the 
middle  of  the  second  century  they  were  the  only  Scriptures 
of  the  new  religion.  Justin  maintains  that  they  belong 
to  the  Christians,  not  to  the  Jews  to  whom  Providence 
only  entrusted  them  provisionally.  Not  less  than  the 
Jews  the  Christians  reverenced  ' '  the  Law  and  the  Proph- 
ets" as  divinely  inspired,  and  their  notion  of  inspira- 
tion was  no  less  thorough-going.  The  words  of  Scripture 
are  the  words  of  God,  not  of  men.  Inspiration  is  not  an 
enlightening  and  energising  of  the  mind  of  the  writer, 
but  a  suspension  of  his  mental  activity ;  the  Spirit  of  God 
speaks  by  the  mouth  of  the  Prophet,  or  of  David  (the 
author  of  all  the  Psalms)  and  dictates  their  very  words. 
This  theory  of  plenary  verbal  inspiration  is  well  expressed 
in  the  simile  of  Athenagoras  (in  the  "Supplicatio")  who 
likens  the  sacred  writer  in  his  relation  to  the  Holy  Scrip- 
ture to  a  flute  in  the  hands  of  a  flute-player. 

It  was  toward  the  end  of  the  second  century  that  this 
way  of  regarding  the  ancient  Hebrew  literature  came  to 
be  applied  to  books  of  Christian  authorship  and  gave  to 
them  an  equal  sacredness  and  authority.  In  the  earlier 
view  of  Justin  (ca.  100-165)  inspiration  can  only  be  claimed 
for  writings  that  have  the  character  of  prophecy.  While 
it  is  a  principle  of  his  apologetic  that  this  character  belongs 
to  the  whole  of  the  Old  Testament,  as  foreshadowing  the 
revelation  in  the  Christ,  he  knows  of  other  prophetic 
books  entitled  to  share  its  high  prerogative,  and  three 


Catholicism  263 

of  them  he  quotes  by  name:  the  Sibylline  Oracles,  the 
prophecy  of  a  certain  Hystaspes,  which  is  cited  by  later 
Fathers,  and  the  Apocalypse  of  John,  the  Apostle  who 
received  a  special  revelation  concerning  the  millennial 
reign.  This  is  the  only  one  of  the  books  afterwards 
pronounced  canonical  to  which  Justin  accords  the  rank 
of  "Scripture";  the  prophetic  inspiration  did  not  attach 
to  the  writings  of  other  Apostles.  Justin  tells  us  that  in 
the  weekly  meetings  of  the  Christians  there  were  readings 
from  the  "memoirs"  of  the  Apostles,  as  well  as  from  the 
writings  of  the  prophets,  and  this  name,  memoirs,  which 
he  gives  to  the  gospels  is  significant:  it  marks  their  dis- 
tinction from  the  miraculously  inspired  writings  of  the 
prophets  in  which  neither  memory  nor  any  human  faculty 
had  part.  And  Justin  further  declares  that  these  memoirs 
had  no  authority  in  themselves,  but  only  such  as  they 
received  from  the  ratification  of  Old  Testament  prophecy 
beforehand. x 

Such  was  the  opinion  of  that  age.  Papias,  the  con- 
temporary of  Justin,  went  so  far  as  to  decry  all  gospel 
writings  in  favor  of  the  oral  tradition  transmitted  by  the 
Elders,  and  notwithstanding  this  extreme  position  Papias 
was  still  a  high  authority  to  the  great  churchman  Irenaeus. 
It  was  the  Christian  faith  that  from  the  first  the  Holy 
Spirit  had  been  given  to  all  disciples,  and  in  what  might 
be  called  the  inspiration  of  the  Apostles  there  was  nothing 
exceptional ;  if  greater  in  degree  than  that  of  other  Chris- 
tians, it  was  not  different  in  kind.  Thus  in  the  Epistle 
to  the  Ephesians  the  Christian  Prophets  form  equally 
with  the  Apostles  the  foundation  of  the  spiritual  temple. 
While  from  an  early  day,  though  not  the  earliest,  the 
authority  of  the  Twelve  Apostles  was  fully  recognised, 

1  Reuss,  History  of  the  Canon  of  the  New  Testament,  48-51.  The  author 
goes  on  (pp.  51-56)  to  show  that  the  "memoirs"  to  which  Justin  refers 
were  gospels  now  lost. 


264  Catholicism 

it  was  that  of  men  appointed  by  the  Lord  himself  and 
personally  entrusted  with  the  charge  of  the  Gospel  and 
the  direction  of  the  Christian  community.  They  were 
organisers  and  administrators;  no  one  thought  of  them 
as  writers.  When  the  so-called  Second  Epistle  of  Clement 
affirms  that  the  claims  of  the  Church  are  attested  by  the 
Books  and  the  Apostles,  this  expression  shows  that  the 
Apostles  were  not  to  be  found  in  books.  Up  to  about 
the  year  165,  Christianity  had  no  sacred  books  of  its  own. 
It  knew  of  no  inspired  Scriptures  besides  the  ancient 
oracles  of  the  Jews.  For  it  was  not  a  book-religion — not 
a  religion  of  authority  and  law,  but  of  inspiration  and 
life.  And  yet  the  time  had  scarcely  passed  when  the 
apostolic  churches  might  have  been  celebrating  the 
centenary  of  their  foundation  before  signs  of  a  coming 
change  appeared  in  a  growing  reverence  for  the  Apostles, 
and  then  for  the  writings  which  some  of  them,  it  was 
believed,  had  bequeathed  to  posterity.  Distance  lent 
enchantment  to  the  view  of  the  past:  miracles,  grown 
rare  and  only  known  by  hearsay,  shed  lustre  on  the 
early  day  when  they  were  frequent;  amid  the  dissensions 
of  the  churches  men  looked  back  with  regret  to  a  time 
when,  it  was  supposed,  Christian  love  had  kept  the  bond 
of  peace  inviolate,  and  the  sad  experience  of  actual 
imperfection  painted  an  ideal  picture  of  a  primitive  golden 
age.  Theologians  and  leaders  of  the  churches  were  moved 
with  a  new  veneration  for  their  illustrious  predecessors, 
hallowed  now  with  an  aureole  of  legend  and  resplendent 
with  the  reflected  glory  of  the  Lord.  Serapion  voiced 
the  general  sentiment  in  the  phrase :  we  accept  the  Apostles 
as  we  do  the  Lord. 

Everything  which  had  any  significance  in  Christian  circles 
in  matters  of  teaching  and  life,  of  discipline  or  worship  was 
now  traced  back  to  the  Apostles;  the  word  "apostolic"  became 


Catholicism  265 

a  synonym  for  "ecclesiastically  correct,"  and  whatever  men 
wished  to  establish  as  truly  Christian  was  represented  in 
good  faith  as  the  rule  or  doctrine  of  the  Apostles.1 

Paul  too  came  at  last  to  his  own  when  men  had  come  far 
enough  away  from  him  to  realise  how  great  he  was.  The 
opposition  he  encountered  from  a  considerable  part  of 
Christendom,  where  his  memory  and  his  preaching  were 
pointedly  ignored  or  openly  attacked,  was  yielding  to  a 
general  recognition  of  his  eminence  as  the  chief  of  Chris- 
tian missionaries  and,  owing  to  the  many  Letters  attri- 
buted to  him,  by  far  the  most  prolific  of  the  early  writers. 
The  literature  of  the  first  Christian  generation  was  given 
an  exalted  place  when  its  admirers  remarked  the  con- 
trast between  its  lofty  spirit  and  glowing  intensity  and  the 
dull  and  colorless  imitations  of  recent  times.  Now  that 
the  spiritual  impulse  which  led  to  the  early  productivity 
had  spent  itself  there  came  a  disposition  to  defer  to  the 
authority  of  the  product  of  the  past.  Such  early  writings 
as  had  been  saved  were  sought  out  and  carefully  studied 
by  individuals  and  churches,  and  the  more  since  the 
Gnostics  were  using  them  in  support  of  their  doctrines 
and  it  was  necessary  to  examine  the  foundation  of  their 
claims.  Moreover  a  great  number  of  books  were  now 
appearing  ascribed  to  authors  of  the  apostolic  age,  and 
this  imposed  the  task  of  discriminating  between  the 
genuine  and  the  pseudonymous.  The  framing  of  a 
Canon  of  Christian  Scripture  was  part  of  a  general  move- 
ment of  the  time,  and  doubtless  the  Catholic  Church  would 
eventually  have  carried  out  the  work  if  there  had  been  no 
heretical  teaching  to  contend  against,  but  heresy  gave 
impetus  to  its  efforts.  The  anti- Jewish  tendencies  of 
Christianity  still  lived  in  the  mind  of  a  minority,  and  the 
prevalent  exaggeration  of  the  authority  of  the  Old  Testa- 

1  Julicher,  An  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament,  474. 


266  Catholicism 

ment  brought  about  a  reaction  on  their  part  in  which 
it  was  rejected  altogether.  This  was  not  to  reject  the 
principle  of  authority,  but  rather,  as  in  the  Reformation 
time,  to  displace  one  authority  by  another.  To  those 
who  discarded  the  Jewish  Scriptures  the  need  was  evident 
of  a  body  of  Christian  Scripture  to  which  they  could  ap- 
peal in  the  discussion  of  questions  wherein  they  differed 
from  the  prevalent  theology,  and  thus  it  may  be  said  that 
the  heretics  took  the  lead  in  the  making  of  a  Canon.  It 
was  Marcion  the  Gnostic  who  first  undertook  the  collecting 
of  apostolic  writings  viewed  as  authoritative  documents. 
His  collection  comprised  the  gospel  of  Luke  and  ten  of 
the  Epistles  ascribed  to  Paul,  and  these  he  edited  with  a 
freedom  of  treatment  beyond  even  the  lax  usage  of  the 
age:  omitting,  altering,  interpolating,  in  order  to  bring 
his  authorities  into  accord  with  gnostic  theories.  From 
the  gospel,  for  example,  he  eliminated  not  only  all  that 
could  be  taken  to  show  a  connection  of  Christianity  with 
Judaism,  but  all  that  was  inconsistent  with  the  view  of 
the  human  life  of  Jesus  as  a  mere  appearance, — a  view 
which  he  claimed,  not  without  ground,  was  that  of  Paul. 
In  this  procedure  Marcion  maintained,  and  he  seems  to 
have  honestly  believed  it,  that  he  was  only  clearing  the 
documents  from  the  glosses  of  the  Judaisers  and  restoring 
them  to  their  original  purity.  However  the  leaders  of 
the  churches  might  judge  of  its  gnostic  application,  they 
were  ready  to  accept  the  principle  of  Marcion,  that  the 
Apostles  were  the  authoritative  witnesses  to  the  truth 
revealed  in  Christ  and  that  their  witness  was  to  be  found 
in  their  writings.  With  the  rise  of  the  idea  of  the  Catholic 
Church,  the  embodiment  of  the  principle  of  Authority, 
the  conviction  took  possession  of  the  minds  of  men  that 
there  was  a  body  of  apostolic  writings,  inspired  and 
authoritative  and  specifically  the  Holy  Scriptures  of 
Christendom.  Upon  these  the  Church  took  its  stand 


Catholicism  267 

against  the  speculative  vagaries  of  the  Gnostics  and  the 
fanaticism  of  personal  inspiration  as  it  appeared  among 
the  Montanists. 

In  later  times  it  was  the  prevalent  belief  that,  as  in 
the  case  of  the  Creed,  the  Church  had  always  had  a  New 
Testament  Canon,  handed  down  direct  from  the  Apostles 
themselves.  Such  a  fancy  could  only  arise  after  the 
lapse  of  many  centuries  and  at  a  time  when  the  long 
history  of  the  formation  of  the  Canon,  with  all  its  uncer- 
tainties and  vacillations,  had  been  quite  forgotten.  Long 
before  there  was  any  thought  of  an  authorised  collection 
of  inspired  writings  the  custom  of  regular  readings  in 
meetings  for  Christian  worship  of  books  believed  to  be 
derived  from  Apostles  or  apostolic  men  was  everywhere 
established.  They  were  read  not  from  deference  to  the 
authority  of  the  writers,  but  simply  because  they  were 
found  to  be  edifying,  yet  to  this  custom  thus  naturally 
arising  and  with  no  ulterior  purpose  we  may  trace  the 
origin  of  the  New  Testament  Canon,  since  it  tended  to 
these  results :  a  high  and  peculiar  estimation  of  the  books 
read  in  public  worship,  and  an  unconscious  process  of 
selection  amongst  the  current  literature  of  such  works  as 
ministered  to  spiritual  needs  and  commended  themselves 
to  the  religious  consciousness.  Naturally,  however,  the 
books  thus  sanctioned  by  public  reading  were  different 
in  the  different  communities.  Some  churches  were  not 
acquainted  with  writings  in  use  elsewhere;  some  refused 
to  accept  books  not  known  to  them  from  the  first,  and 
others  again  received  some  of  these,  but  allowed  them 
only  a  secondary  rank  and  would  not  admit  them  to 
public  reading.  Again,  their  use  in  the  readings  might 
have  consecrated  in  the  eyes  of  a  community  certain 
books  which  now  appeared  of  doubtful  authorship,  while 
others,  which  in  the  view  of  leading  theologians  held 
a  valid  claim  to  apostolicity,  had  not  been  known  soon 


268  Catholicism 

enough  or  widely  enough  to  obtain  general  acceptance. 
Concerning  a  multitude  of  writings  held  in  high  regard 
by  one  or  more  of  the  various  churches  there  was  no 
consensus  of  opinion,  and  for  long  years  they  fluctuated 
between  the  status  of  sacred  and  of  merely  popular  litera- 
ture. Thus  in  the  struggle  with  Gnosticism,  just  at  the 
time  when  the  need  was  felt  of  a  settled  rule  to  mark  off 
from  all  others  those  inspired  texts  which  were  to  have 
decisive  authority  in  the  ever- widening  field  of  theological 
discussion,  it  was  found  to  be  a  task  of  insuperable  diffi- 
culty to  draw  up  a  list  of  inspired  books  which  should 
satisfy  all  claims  and  command  universal  assent.  While  it 
was  agreed  that  the  writings  of  the  Apostles  were  to  be 
reverenced  as  Holy  Scripture,  and  formed  a  class  apart 
from  all  the  other  literature  which  had  been  circulating 
in  Christendom  and  was  in  use  for  the  edification  of  the 
faithful,  there  was  no  way  of  establishing  a  catalogue 
of  the  apostolic  writings,  or  in  the  language  of  a  later 
day — for  it  was  at  the  end  of  the  fourth  century  that  the 
term  Canon  first  came  into  use — to  form  a  Canon  of 
Christian  Scripture. 

That  was  a  work,  or  a  growth,  of  centuries,  and  strictly 
speaking  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  closing  of  the  Canon 
took  place  until  the  session  of  the  Council  of  Trent,  if 
even  then.  This  will  not  seem  so  surprising  when  we 
find  that  the  early  Church  never  laid  down  any  principles 
of  definition  to  guide  the  making  of  a  Canon.  If  we 
ask  on  what  grounds  the  books  of  our  New  Testament 
and  no  others  came  finally  to  form  the  body  of  authorita- 
tive Scripture,  it  must  be  answered  that  there  was  little 
question  of  their  intrinsic  merits,  and  in  the  utter  absence 
of  critical  methods  and  of  the  historic  sense  the  appeal 
was  simply  to  the  tradition  of  ecclesiastical  usage.  An 
essential  characteristic  of  the  rising  Catholicism  was  its 
reliance  upon  the  authority  of  tradition  in  all  matters 


Catholicism  269 

of  belief  and  practice.  While  heretical  teachings  might 
be  based  upon  the  text  of  writings  held  in  high  repute, 
their  opponents  did  not  resort  to  exegetical  arguments 
for  their  refutation,  but  simply  inquired  what  had  been 
transmitted  from  generation  to  generation  by  the  mouth 
of  the  bishops.  It  was  plain  that  private  interpretation 
of  Scriptures  led  to  dangerous  results;  the  only  sure  way 
to  ascertain  the  true  faith  was  to  consult  tradition  as  it 
had  been  preserved  in  the  churches  by  the  successors  of  the 
Apostles.  This  is  the  method  strongly  advocated  by 
Irenaeus  and  Tertullian.  According  to  them  the  Spirit 
only  comes  to  individuals  in  that  they  share  the  corporate 
life  of  the  Church,  for  "where  the  Church  is  there  is  the 
Spirit  of  God."  Hence  the  heads  of  the  churches,  as  guar- 
dians of  the  tradition,  are  the  authoritative  expounders 
of  the  truth,  and  if  the  Apostles  had  written  nothing,  re- 
course could  still  be  had  to  the  tradition  of  the  churches 
they  founded  as  equally  competent  to  determine  questions 
of  the  faith.  As  all  know,  this  principle  of  subordinating 
Scripture  to  ecclesiastical  tradition  was  a  chief  point  of 
attack  by  the  Reformers  of  the  sixteenth  century.  Natu- 
rally then,  in  the  efforts  to  establish  a  scriptural  Canon  it 
was  tradition  that  directed  the  choice  of  the  sacred 
books,  tradition  which,  it  was  assumed,  rested  on  pri- 
mordial guarantees,  on  testimonies  of  the  first  age — 
an  assumption  as  unfounded  as  it  was  confident. 

The  practical  question  was,  what  writings  are  to  be 
sanctioned  for  reading  in  the  meetings  for  Christian 
worship?  The  first  Christians  might  have  answered, 
Those  that  breathe  the  spirit  of  Christ,  and  of  that  the 
Christian  spirit  in  their  own  hearts  would  be  the  judge. 
The  many  gospel  narratives  in  use  among  the  churches 
of  that  early  day  were  valued  not  for  being  apostolic, 
but  for  being  gospels — because  they  "  related  the  things 
concerning  the  Lord."  "The  fear  that  without  careful 


270  Catholicism 

examination  spurious  writings  might  be  smuggled  in  did 
not  belong  to  those  early  times."1  Now  the  criterion 
had  changed  from  one  of  inward  quality  to  one  of  outward 
fact,  or  of  supposed  fact.  If  the  readings  in  the  public 
services  were  limited  to  works  of  the  Apostles,  then,  it 
seemed,  the  religious  training  of  the  faithful  would  be 
safely  assured,  and  so  it  became  the  point  of  chief  impor- 
tance to  determine  the  apostolic  authorship  of  books  in 
use  among  the  churches.  This  question  of  apostolicity 
itself  had  to  be  decided  in  the  case  of  a  given  book,  not 
by  appreciation  of  its  character  as  consonant  with  the 
claim,  but  wholly  on  external  evidence.  Apostolicity 
was  the  only  ground  of  inspiration,  and  the  only  attesta- 
tion of  apostolicity  was  ecclesiastical  recognition.  The 
criterion  tended  to  reverse  itself:  it  was  said  that  a  book 
was  read  because  it  was  apostolic,  in  fact  it  was  held  to 
be  apostolic  because  it  was  read.  Unfortunately  when 
the  churches  were  summoned  to  give  their  testimony  as 
to  what  books  they  received  for  apostolic,  this  brought 
little  help  to  a  decision,  for  the  only  certain  fact  elicited 
was  the  wide  diversity  of  usage. 

The  long  history  of  the  Canon  is  one  of  ever  repeated 
and  ever  futile  efforts  to  reach  a  definitive  settlement  of 
the  question;  for  centuries  we  watch  the  pursuit  of  a 
flying  goal.  It  is  true  that  toward  the  end  of  the  second 
century  there  came  to  be  a  general  agreement  as  to  the 
superiority  of  our  four  gospels  and  most  of  the  so-called 
Pauline  Epistles  to  other  writings  of  their  kind,  but  such 
an  estimate  did  not  confer  canonicity  upon,  these  writings 
in  the  sense  of  exclusive  authority.2  Early  in  the  third 

1  Julicher,  op.  cit.,  482. 

2  Irenaeus  was  convinced  that  there  must  be  just  four  gospels  because 
there  are  four  winds  and  four  quarters  of  the  earth.    To  what  extent  this 
argument  carried  weight  with  his  contemporaries  we  have  no  means  of 
ascertaining. 


Catholicism  271 

century  a  gospel  according  to  Peter  was  in  use  in  Cilicia 
with  the  permission  of  Serapion,  the  bishop,  and  the  only 
gospel  of  the  Syrian  churches  until  the  middle  of  the 
fifth  century  was  Tatian's  Diatessaron  (c.  175)  a  kind  of 
"Life  of  Christ"  drawn  from  the  current  gospels.     It 
has  been  taken  for  granted  that  Tatian  made  use  of  our 
four  gospels  only,  but  of  this  we  cannot  be  certain.    The 
name  Diatessaron  does  not  settle  the  question,  for  that 
was  a  technical  musical  term  for  accord,  or  harmony,  and 
might  properly  be  given  to  a  compilation  of  any  number 
of  writings.     Evidently  neither  Tatian  nor  his  readers 
regarded  the  text  of  the  gospels  as  inspired;  otherwise 
they  could  not  have  been  treated  with  such  freedom. 
Everywhere  the  question  whether  a  given  book  should 
be  taken  for  Scripture  received  different  answers.     In 
certain    churches    some    books    afterwards    pronounced 
canonical  were  rejected;  in  other  churches  some  were 
received  that  afterwards  were  excluded  from  the  Canon. 
So   with  the   theologians:   Irenaeus,   while  ignoring  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  those  of  James,  Jude  and  II  Peter, 
quotes  as   Scripture  the  Epistle  of   Clement   and    the 
Shepherd  of  Hermas ;  and  Clement  of  Alexandria  claims  in- 
spiration for  such  writings  as  the  Preaching  of  Peter,  the 
Gospel  of  the  Egyptians  and  the  Traditions  of  Matthias. 
An  attempt  to  draw  up  a  catalogue  of  scriptural  books 
has  come  down  to  us  in  the  famous  Muratorian  Fragment, 
so-called  from  its  discoverer  Muratori,  a  scholar  of  the 
eighteenth  century.     It  is  supposed  to  date  from  about 
190,  to  be  of  African  origin  and  to  give  the  usage  of  that 
Province;    although   Julicher   remarks:     "How   far   the 
unknown  author  sets  forth  his  own  ideas  must  remain 
uncertain."     It  contains  our  four  gospels,  Acts,  thirteen 
Epistles  of  Paul,  I  and  II  John,  Jude,  the  Apocalypse  of 
John  and  that  of  Peter.     It  is  difficult  to  discover  any 
principle  which  governs  this  selection.     The  fourth  gospel 


272  Catholicism 

is  defended  on  the  ground  that  its  author  was  an  eye- 
witness of  the  things  he  writes,  as  he  asserts  in  his  first 
Epistle,  and  a  legendary  account  of  the  composition  of 
the  gospel  is  added  in  which  Dr.  Davidson  (Encyclopedia 
Britannica,  Article  Canon)  finds  this  significance:  "The 
story  of  its  origin,  with  its  apostolic  and  episcopal  attesta- 
tion, evinces  a  desire  to  establish  the  authenticity  of  a 
work  which  had  not  obtained  universal  acceptance  at  the 
time."  The  gospels  of  Mark  and  Luke  are  also  counted 
among  the  Holy  Scriptures — although  their  authors  are 
neither  apostolic  nor  eye-witnesses,  but  only  collectors 
from  unknown  sources — on  the  assumption  that  their 
narratives  are  vouched  for  by  Peter  or  Paul.  It  is  not 
clear  whether  the  Fragmentist,  as  he  is  called,  takes  Paul 
to  have  been  an  eye-witness  to  the  life  of  Jesus,  or  whether 
in  his  case  he  gives  up  the  point  he  lays  such  stress  upon 
in  the  case  of  the  other  gospels,  and  accepts  the  apos- 
tolic inspiration  as  an  equivalent  to  personal  knowledge 
of  events.  The  Epistles  of  Paul  addressed  to  separate 
communities  are  said  to  be  the  common  possession  of  the 
Church,  not  because  of  their  inherent  universality — 
because  they  are  found  to  be  of  spiritual  worth  in  the 
Christian  experience,  but  because  the  symbolism  of  the 
perfect  number  declares  them  to  be  really  addressed  to 
the  whole  Church:  "Paul,  following  the  example  of  John, 
wrote  to  seven  churches,  thereby  showing  the  unity  of  the 
Catholic  Church,  for  it  is  known  that  there  is  but  one 
single  Church  spread  over  the  whole  earth."  "How 
surely  would  the  author  have  added  here  the  interesting 
fact  that  there  are  also  seven  Catholic  epistles,  if  all  the 
seven  had  been  known  to  him."  x  The  Apostle's  letters  to 
individuals  must  also  be  accepted  as  Scripture  because 
in  spite  of  their  private  character  they  deal  with  matters 
of  ecclesiastical  discipline.  This  external  justification  of 
1  Moore,  op.  cit.,  126. 


Catholicism  273 

the  Pauline  Epistles  shows  that  the  principle,  whatever 
is  apostolic  is  canonical,  is  not  a  matter  of  course  with  the 
Fragmentist.  He  would  make  it  decisive,  however,  in 
the  case  of  Hernias.  His  Apocalypse  is  to  be  commended 
as  orthodox  and  edifying,  but  it  is  not  to  be  read  in  public 
worship,  for  the  writer  has  no  place  among  the  Prophets, 
whose  membership  had  long  been  complete,  nor  among 
the  Apostles,  since  he  belonged  to  a  later  age.  On  the 
other  hand  the  Epistles  to  Laodicea  and  Alexandria, 
circulating  •  as  Pauline,  are  to  be  rejected  not  because 
they  are  spurious  but  because  they  are  heretical.  So  also 
many  churches  refused  to  receive  the  Apocalypse  of 
Peter,  dear  to  the  Fragmentist,  although  it  was  not  at- 
tacked as  non-apostolic.  In  these  cases  it  is  the  contents 
of  the  writing,  not  the  person  of  the  writer  that  sets  the 
standard;  and  in  this  view  the  orthodox  Hermas  might 
claim  a  revisal  of  the  judgment  against  him.  A  little 
later  we  find  a  dogmatic  judgment  taking  the  form  of 
historical  criticism.  Bishop  Serapion,  becoming  convinced 
that  the  gospel  of  Peter  was  heretical  in  sentiment,  re- 
voked his  permission  for  its  use  on  the  ground  that  it 
was  a  forgery.  That  is,  if  the  doctrine  of  a  book  did  not 
agree  with  that  of  acknowledged  apostolic  writings  it 
must  be  concluded  that  it  was  not  apostolic.  This 
criterion  was  based  upon  the  assumed  unanimity  of  the 
apostolic  writers,  in  blindness  to  the  essential  differences 
in  their  theological  views. 

In  the  following  century  the  attitude  of  the  learned 
Origen  (c.  185-234)  toward  the  question  shows  that  there 
was  abundant  room  for  the  exercise  of  independent 
judgment  in  relation  to  a  scriptural  Canon.  He  is  con- 
vinced of  the  inspiration  of  Hermas,  quotes  the  Didache 
as  Holy  Scripture  and  supports  the  claims  of  Clement  and 
Barnabas  to  be  so  accepted.  The  Acts  of  Paul  and  the 
Gospel  of  the  Hebrews  he  is  not  prepared  to  rank  with 

18 


274  Catholicism 

acknowledged  Scripture,  but  he  attributes  to  them  an 
authority  scarcely  inferior,  while  he  refuses  to  recognise 
the  Gospel  of  the  Twelve  and  is  unwilling  to  express  a 
decided  opinion  concerning  the  Preaching  of  Peter.  In 
the  course  of  such  discussions  Origen  is  led  to  suggest  a 
critical  classification  of  the  Christian  literature  which 
might  serve  as  a  rule  for  the  Church,  according  to  which 
all  writings  would  be  distributed  under  three  categories, 
the  genuine,  the  spurious,  and  the  mixed — that  is,  those 
which  in  spite  of  their  apocryphal  character  had  elements 
of  unquestionable  value.  From  this  distinction  it  appears 
that  in  the  view  of  Origen  the  intrinsic  worth  of  a  writing 
— a  matter  for  critical  appreciation — had  something  to 
say  in  the  determination  of  its  canonicity.  The  deliver- 
ances of  this  eminent  theologian  regarding  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews  are  especially  significant  of  the  freedom  of 
opinion  on  the  canonical  question,  which  shows  that  it 
was  one  still  open  for  discussion.  On  critical  grounds  he 
pronounces  that  the  Epistle  is  not  of  Paul,  and  declares 
"God  alone  knows  who  wrote  it,"  but  his  admiration 
for  a  book  so  in  line  with  his  own  allegorical  treatment  of 
the  Old  Testament  leads  him  to  suggest  that  the  ideas  are 
Pauline  though  the  form  of  their  expression  is  due  to 
another,  and  hence  "if  any  church  holds  it  to  be  Paul's 
it  is  not  in  error."  On  the  strength  of  this  venturesome 
argument  he  would  include  in  the  Canon  an  Epistle  of 
unknown  authorship  because  he  likes  it,  because  it  suits 
his  taste.  Evidently  the  rule  of  apostolicity  has  not  at 
this  time  acquired  binding  force. 

We  come  next  to  Eusebius  (270-340)  who  more  than 
any  other  devoted  earnest  labor  to  the  question  of  the 
Canon.  He  cites  an  immense  number  of  authors  to  note 
their  lists  of  scriptural  books  and  the  judgments  they 
pronounce  on  various  writings  that  claimed  a  place  among 
them.  From  his  careful  sifting  of  the  individual  testi- 


Catholicism  275 

monies,  and  his  reference  to  the  usage  of  particular  com- 
munities as  well,  it  is  evident  that  the  Canon  was  still  all 
in  the  air;  there  was  no  official  declaration,  nor  any 
common  agreement  of  churches  or  bishops  to  be  appealed 
to  as  a  final  authority.  The  method  of  our  scholar  is  to 
count  the  votes  of  his  witnesses  and  on  this  basis  to 
divide  all  writings  which  claimed  to  be  sacred  into  three 
classes :  those  received,  those  disputed,  and  those  rejected. 
Thus  the  classification  is  not  determined  by  any  criticism 
of  the  teaching  or  tendency  of  a  book,  but  solely  by  the 
usage  of  the  churches  and  the  opinions  of  ecclesiastical 
writers.  We  are  chiefly  concerned  with  the  intermediate 
class,  those  whose  claim  to  be  Scripture,  or  "  Covenant 
books"  (lvStd0T]x.a),  was  not  universally  allowed  but 
which  nevertheless  were  ''consecrated  to  public  use  in 
most  of  the  churches."  The  books  given  under  this  cate- 
gory are  the  five  doubtful  Catholic  Epistles,  the  Apoca- 
lypse of  John,  the  Gospel  of  Peter  and  that  of  the  Hebrews, 
the  Acts  of  Paul,  the  Epistles  of  Barnabas  and  of  Clement, 
the  Shepherd  of  Hennas,  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  and  the 
Teaching  of  the  Apostles.  Eusebius  nowever  shows 
himself  undecided  as  to  this  pronouncement.  He  has 
reckoned  fourteen  Epistles  of  Paul  among  the  books 
universally  received,  thus  including  Hebrews,  but  he 
adds  that  several  reject  that  Epistle  on  the  ground  that 
the  Church  of  Rome  maintains  its  non-Pauline  author- 
ship, and  in  another  place  he  classes  it  with  the  con- 
troverted books.  Among  these  Clement  appears,  but 
else  where  he  tells  us  that  this  "beautiful  and  admirable" 
Epistle  is  universally  received  by  the  churches.  The 
Acts  of  Paul  he  admits  is  not  undisputed  but  he  places 
it  in  his  second  class  with  evident  reluctance.  So  of  the 
Gospel  of  the  Hebrews  he  makes  the  vague  remark  that 
some  place  it  among  the  contested  books,  but  others  use 
it  from  preference.  On  the  other  hand  the  Apocalypse 


276  Catholicism 

of  Peter  is  ranked  sometimes  with  the  disputed  books, 
sometimes — apparently  under  the  influence  of  the  Greeks' 
distaste  for  this  style  of  literature — with  those  to  be  re- 
jected. Even  greater  uncertainty  attends  his  disposition 
of  the  Apocalypse  of  John.  He  appears  strongly  inclined 
to  reject  it,  but  decides  to  give  it  as  a  disputed  book,  with 
the  comment  that  many  hold  it  to  be  heretical  while  some 
include  it  among  the  received  Scriptures.  And  then  when 
giving  his  list  of  these  latter  he  tells  us:  "To  these  must 
be  added,  if  it  be  thought  right,  the  Apocalypse  of  John"; 
we  are  left  with  the  book  in  all  three  classes.  The  fact 
is,  if  Eusebius  does  not  know  what  to  do  with  it,  that 
is  owing  to  the  clashing  testimonies  of  successive  periods. 
After  enjoying  exceptional  distinction  in  the  earlier 
time  it  had  later  on  fallen  into  disesteem  in  the  East, 
especially  since  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  in  the  century 
preceding  had  raised  grave  doubts  of  its  apostolicity. 
It  appears  that  likes  and  dislikes  had  a  good  deal  to  do 
with  judgments  respecting  canonicity.  From  its  vague- 
ness and  obscurity  Jewish  Apocalyptic  was  distasteful  to 
the  logically  trained  Greek  mind,  and  the  desire  to  get 
rid  of  its  inconvenient  apostolicity  sharpened  the  critical 
perception  that  the  Apocalypse  of  "John"  could  not  have 
come  from  the  hand  that  wrote  the  fourth  gospel.  It  is 
probable  that  but  for  the  attitude  of  the  Greeks  the 
Apocalypse  of  Peter,  which  has  a  place  in  the  Muratorian 
Canon,  would  have  been  received  in  the  West.  On  the 
other  hand  we  have  just  seen  that  Origen  is  led  to  regard 
Hebrews  as  constructively  apostolic  by  the  wish  which 
is  father  to  the  thought,  and  it  is  instructive  to  find  that 
the  "inward  witness"  of  the  Spirit  suggests  to  Calvin 
the  same  view  of  that  Epistle  to  which  Origen  inclined 
from  personal  liking.  The  case  of  the  Apocalypse  is  not 
the  only  one  in  which  Eusebius  finds  himself  embarrassed 
by  the  fluctuations  of  opinion.  If  he  appears  hesitating, 


Catholicism  277 

inconsistent,  and  confused,  it  is  because  the  tradition 
respecting  certain  books  was  still  wavering,  and  he  was 
unable  to  fix  it  or  attain  to  any  decided  results.  One 
fact  his  discussion  of  the  subject  brings  out  plainly,  and 
that  is  that  the  books  which  very  many  regarded  as 
Scripture  were  much  more  numerous  than  those  of  our 
New  Testament.  To  this  the  Uncials  also  bear  their 
witness.  The  Sinaitic  Codex  of  the  fourth  century  in- 
cludes in  the  New  Testament  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas 
and  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas,  the  Alexandrine  of  the 
fifth  century  has  the  first  and  second  Epistles  of  Clement, 
and  the  Claromontane  of  the  sixth,  the  Acts  of  Paul  and 
the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  in  addition  to  Barnabas  and 
Hermas.  The  Vatican  Codex  being  incomplete,  we  cannot 
tell  what  books  now  uncanonical  it  may  have  contained. 
About  the  time  of  Eusebius'  death  was  born  one  of  the 
most  famous  doctors  of  the  Latin  Church  who  was  led 
to  an  examination  of  the  condition  of  the  Canon  in  the 
course  of  his  labors  as  translator  of  the  Sacred  books. 
Jerome  (c.  340-420)  gives  us  his  views  to  this  effect :  He- 
brews, he  writes,  is  excluded  from  the  Pauline  Epistles  by 
most  churches,  and  he  leaves  us  to  make  what  we  can 
of  the  further  pronouncement  that  "all  Greek  authors 
attribute  it  to  Paul,  though  most  believe  it  to  be  by  Barna- 
bas or  Clement."  For  himself  he  guesses  it  to  be  a 
translation  by  another  hand  of  a  Hebrew  original,  but  he 
brings  nothing  to  the  support  of  this  hypothesis.  The 
Epistle  of  Jude,  he  says,  is  rejected  by  most;  still,  he 
maintains,  it  was  very  early  reckoned  among  the  Holy 
Scriptures.  The  authorship  of  II  Peter  is  much  dis- 
puted and,  as  he  alleges,  on  linguistic  grounds.  We 
cannot  admit  that  to  be  the  motive,  for  it  assumes  a 
critical  treatment  of  the  Christian  writings  which  did 
not  exist,  but  it  is  one  that  allows  him  to  defend  the 
Epistle.  If  it  differs  in  style  from  the  first,  it  is  because 


278  Catholicism 

the  Apostle  employed  different  secretaries;  in  that  case 
we  do  not  possess  an  apostolic  scripture,  but  only  the 
writing  of  another  made  freely  according  to  general 
directions  from  the  Bishop  of  Rome — as  Jerome  calls 
him — for  he  is  thoroughly  convinced  that  Peter  was 
Bishop  of  Rome,  for  twenty-five  years.  Such  an  explana- 
tion adopts  a  principle  which  involves  serious  consequences 
for  the  whole  New  Testament,  something  which  our  author 
does  not  perceive,  or  regards  with  placid  unconcern.  The 
Epistle  of  James — whom  he  makes  one  of  the  Twelve — 
is  considered,  he  tells  us,  to  have  been  written  by  another 
in  that  Apostle's  name;  but  in  time,  he  adds,  it  gained 
authority.  John,  he  says,  wrote  one  single  Epistle  which 
is  acknowledged  by  all;  the  two  others  he  attributes  to  a 
presbyter  John  whose  tomb  might  still  be  seen  at  Ephesus. 
As  to  the  latter  statement  Reuss  remarks:  "I  do  not 
know  a  single  ancient  author  who  gave  it  out  before 
Jerome."  What  appears  certain  is  that  second  and  third 
John  were  not  accepted  as  apostolic  by  the  early  churches. 
In  regard  to  the  authorship  of  the  Apocalypse  Jerome 
seems  to  have  adopted  the  position  of  Dionysius  of 
Alexandria.  As  to  other  doubtful  books  he  would  like  to 
obtain  recognition  for  the  gospel  of  the  Hebrews,  he  urges 
that  the  Epistle  of  Clement  is  read  in  many  churches,  and 
he  appends  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  to  a  canonical  list. 

If  such  uncertainties  continued  to  perplex  the  most 
learned  scholar  of  the  day,  it  is  plain  that  the  fourth 
century  found  itself  unable  to  finish  the  task  which  the 
second  had  left  incomplete.  And  very  significant  of  the 
carelessly  uncritical  treatment  which  the  whole  question 
received  is  Jerome's  naive  suggestion  that  in  the  interest 
of  comity  the  Greeks  and  Latins  should  adopt  each  other's 
antilegomena,  or  the  books  they  respectively  objected  to. 
For  the  vexed  question  was  further  complicated  by  the 
divergent  interests  of  thought  and  life.  Theology  favored 


Catholicism  279 

a  rigorous  selection  which  should  exclude  any  writing 
of  doubtful  orthodoxy;  ecclesiasticism  welcomed  every- 
thing it  found  useful  in  popular  instruction  and  adapted 
to  the  needs,  of  plain  people  not  conversant  with  specula- 
tion. The  one  was  unwilling  to  admit  anything  that  could 
not  show  traditional  evidence  of  divine  origin,  and  the 
other  unwilling  to  reject  anything  that  was  sanctified  by 
usage.  These  opposite  points  of  view  were  maintained 
respectively  by  the  East  and  West.  We  find  for  instance 
a  synod  of  Laodicea  ruling  out  the  Apocalypse,  and  one 
of  Carthage  including  in  its  list  the  Acts  of  the  Martyrs. 
The  bishops  of  Asia  were  men  of  theory,  their  chief  interest 
was  in  a  Christian  philosophy,  and  their  ruling  takes  its 
place  in  the  long  series  of  dogmatic  decisions  pronounced 
by  Eastern  Councils.  The  African  bishops  were  men  of 
practice;  they  had  regard  to  the  regulation  of  worship 
and  of  teaching,  and  their  decision  belongs  to  the  class  of 
disciplinary  statutes  for  which  the  West  showed  always  a 
peculiar  aptitude.  Thus  while  men  on  the  one  hand 
deferred  to  the  necessities  of  dogmatic  theology,  and  on 
the  other  to  the  utilitarian  interests  of  the  Church,  no 
common  valuation  of  the  sacred  books  could  be  agreed 
upon,  and  all  efforts  toward  the  forming  of  a  Canon  came 
to  nothing.  Concerning  two  books  in  particular  there 
was  an  irreconcilable  difference  of  opinion.  The  Apoca- 
lypse, repudiated  by  the  Eastern  churches,  was  widely 
venerated  in  the  West,  and  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
which  the  West  refused  to  acknowledge,  held  a  high  place 
in  the  esteem  of  the  East. 

And  now  there  entered  on  the  scene  a  dominating  per- 
sonality deeply  impressed  with  the  need  of  putting  an 
end  to  these  uncertainties,  and  anxious  above  all  for  some 
settlement  of  the  question.  At  first  it  was  the  attempt  of 
Augustine  (354-430)  to  reconcile  the  restriction  imposed 
by  doctrinal  demands  with  the  liberty  claimed  in  the 


28o  Catholicism 

interest  of  practical  usage,  and  so  he  recommends  the 
reading  of  the  Canonical  books  of  Scripture  first  of  all, 
and  then,  when  grounded  in  the  faith,  the  Christian  may 
go  on  to  the  other  divine  Scriptures  which  are  not  canoni- 
cal.1 Unfortunately  the  Canon  was  still  an  aim,  a 
desideratum,  not  an  accomplished  fact,  and  the  question 
naturally  arises  how  is  one  to  tell  the  Canonical  Scriptures 
from  the  uncanonical  ?  Augustine  replies,  he  is  to  follow 
the  lead  of  the  churches :  those  books  received  by  all  will 
be  preferred  to  those  received  only  by  some,  and  of  these 
latter  those  will  be  preferred  which  are  received  by 
the  greatest  number  and  by  the  most  considerable 
churches.  Such  a  method  of  estimating  the  relative 
value  of  the  sacred  books  might  be  looked  for  from 
the  great  ecclesiastic  who  declares :  "I  would  not  believe 
the  Gospel  if  the  Catholic  Church  did  not  guarantee  its 
truth."  It  appears  that  according  to  Augustine  the 
authority  of  the  Scriptures  is  not  inherent  in  the  books 
themselves,  but  is  attached  to  them — depends  on  the 
chance  they  have  had  of  a  wide  circulation  among  the 
churches.  Thus  the  quest  of  canonicity  still  remains  one 
of  figures  and  statistics,  and  as  it  was  practically  im- 
possible to  gather  and  to  weigh  the  suffrages  of  all  the 
churches  in  Christendom,  no  certain  result  was  to  be 
reached,  and  we  find  doctors  and  synods  continually 
speaking  of  " canonical  books"  without  knowing  exactly 
what  they  were.2  Meantime  as  the  need  of  fixity  was 

1  The  position  here  taken  that  there  are  uncanonical  books  which  yet 
are  divine  Scripture  was  soon  found  to  be  untenable,  and  the  synod  of 
Carthage  under  Augustine's  direction  expressly  abandoned  it. 

a  According  to  Dr.  Davidson  (Encyclopedia  Britannica,  gth  Ed.,  vol.  v, 
12)  "  Augustine  was  unfitted  for  the  task  of  settling  the  Canon.  A  tradi- 
tion arbitrarily  assumed  dominated  all  his  ideas  of  selection.  His  judgment 
was  weak,  his  sagacity  moderate,  and  his  lack  of  learning  hindered  a  critical 
result.  Jerome,  again,  was  learned  but  timid,  lacking  the  courage  to  face 
the  question  fairly  and  fundamentally  and  the  independence  necessary  to 
its  right  investigation." 


Catholicism  281 

increasingly  felt,  there  appeared  in  the  Latin  Church  a 
growing  disposition  to  draw  a  sharp  distinction  between 
scriptural  books  and  others  which  had  been  deemed 
profitable  for  edification.  Gradually  the  term  apocry- 
phal, with  the  sense  of  spurious  and  dangerous,  became 
the  antithesis  of  canonical;  writings  the  most  innocent, 
once  esteemed  precious,  were  swept  into  the  category  of 
proscription  and  the  faithful  warned  against  them. 

And  now  since  all  efforts  to  form  a  Canon  by  a  Catholic 
consensus  of  opinion  had  patently  failed,  it  only  remained 
that  the  question  should  be  settled  once  for  all  by  the 
mailed  hand  of  authority.  In  three  African  synods  (393, 
397,  and  419),  virtually  under  the  control  of  Augustine, 
the  Canon  was  the  subject  of  long  consideration,  and  the 
list  finally  set  forth  comprised  the  twenty-seven  books  of 
our  New  Testament  together  with  the  Acts  of  the  Mar- 
tyrs, thus  including  all  of  our  New  Testament  books  that 
were  in  dispute,  but  rejecting  all  other  writings  of  the 
doubtful  class,  with  a  single  exception.  It  was  decided 
to  submit  this  list  to  the  consideration  of  the  Church  of 
Rome,  but  the  Roman  confirmation  never  came,  because 
the  Acts  of  the  Martyrs  was  not  read  in  the  Italian 
churches,  and  perhaps  for  other  reasons.  This  was  the 
first  formal  attempt  at  legislation,  and  though  the  African 
councils  possessed  no  authority  beyond  the  province, 
yet  through  the  powerful  influence  of  Augustine  this 
codification  is  the  one  that  substantially  came  to  prevail 
in  the  Western  Church,  where  it  is  said  to  have  obtained 
the  sanction  of  a  papal  decree  during  the  pontificate  of 
Gelasius  (492-496). I  In  the  East,  however,  there  was 
never  any  authoritative  pronouncement  in  definition  of 
the  Canon — in  some  regions  the  New  Testament  num- 
bered thirty-five  books — and  the  question  remained  open 

1  Concerning  this  so-called  decree  see  Reuss,  op.  tit.,  233-235. 


282  Catholicism 

for  discussion  until,  in  the  intellectual  stagnation  that 
settled  down  upon  the  Greek  Church  during  the  ninth 
century,  interest  in  the  subject  died  out,  and  at  length 
in  1672  a  council  of  Jerusalem  accepted  the  Western 
Canon  with  its  twenty-seven  books.  It  is  too  much  to 
say  that  the  fifth  century  saw  the  definitive  closing  of  the 
Canon  in  the  West. x  In  some  MSS.  of  later  date  Hebrews 
is  wanting,  in  others  Hermas  is  added,  or  the  Apostolic 
Constitutions;  many  have  fifteen  Epistles  of  Paul,  that 
is,  including  one  to  the  Laodiceans,  which  may  indeed 
be  found  in  editions  of  the  New  Testament  after  the  inven- 
tion of  printing.  The  Claremontane  Codex  of  the  sixth 
century  contains,  as  we  have  seen,  four  books  other  than 
our  twenty-seven,  and  the  Bobbiensine  of  the  same  age 
has  a  Liber  Sacramentorium,  or  Mass-Book,  placed  after 
the  four  gospels.  In  fact  throughout  the  Middle  Ages  no 
official  decision  of  questions  affecting  the  Canon  was 
rendered  by  the  Church,  for  since  its  dogmatic  teaching 
was  based  less  upon  Scripture  than  upon  ecclesiastical 
tradition,  such  questions  had  become  of  secondary 
interest,  and  if  the  Reformers  had  not  thrust  them  for- 
ward into  the  arena  of  debate  the  indecision  regarding 
them  might  have  continued  indefinitely.2  And  so  we 
find  the  doctors  of  Trent  proceeding  to  draw  up  a  Canon 
of  Holy  Scripture,  and  considering  four  different  proposals 
as  to  principle  and  method,  as  though  they  were  dealing 
with  a  matter  hitherto  untouched.  The  final  action  of 
the  Council,  as  all  know,  was  to  canonise  the  Latin  Vul- 

1  "  It  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  represent  the  Canon  as  finally  settled 
at  this  time  in  Western  Christendom.  .  .  .  The  written  law  is  far  from 
having  extinguished  the  opposing  rights  of  custom . ' '  Julicher,  op.  cit. ,  542 . 

a"The  whole  discussion  died  out,  not  because  the  matter  was  sifted 
and  settled  and  a  perfect  Canon  of  Scripture  deliberately  formed;  it  died 
out  as  medieval  ignorance  deepened,  and  because  there  was  no  longer 
knowledge  or  criticism  enough  in  the  world  to  keep  such  a  discussion 
alive."  Matthew  Arnold,  Literature  and  Dogma,  xxv. 


Catholicism  283 

gate,  thus  declaring  all  its  books  to  be  of  equal  divine 
authority.  There  were  some  who  pleaded  for  a  revision 
of  the  text,  or  even  a  new  version  of  the  Greek,  but  that 
way  lay  peril ;  it  was  safer  to  decree  the  inspiration  of  St. 
Jerome,  and  the  faithful  were  advised  that  the  Holy 
Spirit  had  dictated  the  translation  just  as  He  had  dictated 
the  originals. 

It  would  seem  that  the  Reformation  might  be  expected 
to  bring  with  it  such  a  free  investigation  of  the  Church 
tradition  as  should  lead  to  a  recasting  of  the  Canon,  but 
in  fact  nothing  whatever  was  accomplished  to  affect  the 
Tridentine  settlement  in  the  slightest  degree.  The  move- 
ment was  indeed  a  revolt  against  the  authority  of  the 
Church  which  appealed  to  Scripture  for  its  justification. 
Hence  the  authority  of  Scripture  had  to  be  derived  from  a 
source  independent  of  the  Church,  and  Zwingli  explicitly 
contradicts  Augustine  when  he  says:  " Whoever  pretends 
that  the  Gospel  is  nothing  without  the  sanction  and 
approbation  of  the  Church  speaks  blasphemy."  Calvin 
and  other  leaders  took  the  position  that  the  Bible  as  the 
immediate  work  of  God  holds  its  authority  only  from 
itself;  not  the  Church  but  the  Holy  Spirit  is  guarantor  of 
Scripture,  and  the  Spirit  addresses  the  individual  directly 
and  not  through  the  medium  of  the  Church.  The  in- 
terpretation of  the  Scriptures  is  to  be  sought  from  them- 
selves alone  by  faith  and  piety;  the  Holy  Spirit  in  our 
hearts  bears  witness  to  their  divine  truth,  and  the  evidence 
of  their  inspiration  is  their  power  to  inspire  the  religious 
soul.  This  theory  of  the  "inner  witness,"  the  illumina- 
tion of  the  Spirit,  is  not  advanced  to  meet  polemical 
exigencies,  it  belongs  to  the  circle  of  ideas  essentially 
characteristic  of  Protestantism — regeneration,  justifica- 
tion, grace,  faith — and  to  that  element  of  mysticism 
which  is  dominant  in  all  deep  personal  religion.  It  is 
obvious  that  if  this  religious  intuition  is  to  judge  of  the 


284  Catholicism 

truth  and  worth  of  Scripture  it  must  be  able  to  determine 
what  is  Scripture,  but  while  the  confessions  declare  that 
the  sanction  of  the  inner  witness  is  the  criterion  of  can- 
onicity,  they  assume  that  it  has  nothing  to  do  but  ratify 
the  canon  as  already  established.  z  Scholars  were  indeed 
aware  of  the  fact,  which  Erasmus  had  pointed  out,  that 
seven  of  the  New  Testament  books — Hebrews,  the 
Apocalypse,  James,  II  Peter,  II  and  III  John,  Jude — 
had  been  admitted  into  the  Canon  at  a  very  late  date  and 
after  long  hesitation,  and  Bucer  insisted  that  the  early 
Church  had  recognised  only  twenty  as  undoubtedly 
proceeding  from  the  Holy  Spirit  until  the  Council  of 
Carthage  had  cut  the  knot  of  all  uncertainties  regarding 
the  seven  disputed  writings  by  its  decree  that  placed  them 
in  the  Canon.  Some  were  now  disposed  to  reopen  the 
case,  and  Zwingli  declared  for  the  rejection  of  the  Apoca- 
lypse as  "not  a  biblical  book."  It  was  found  difficult 
however  to  determine  the  status  of  a  doubtful  writing  by 
the  intuitional  principle,  because  the  witness  of  the  Spirit, 
or  the  impression  received  from  a  book  with  scriptural 
claims,  would  vary  considerably  according  to  individual 
temperament,  and  one  might  be  edified  by  a  writing  that 
would  leave  another  unmoved.  Thus  the  Protestant 


1  The  Belgic  Confession,  after  giving  the  list  of  the  New  Testament 
books,  goes  on  to  say:  " These  are  the  only  books  we  receive  as  canonical, 
and  we  believe  all  that  is  contained  in  them  not  so  much  because  the 
Church  receives  them  as  because  the  Holy  Ghost  witnesses  in  our  hearts 
that  they  proceed  from  God."  The  Gallic  Confession  speaks  to  the  same 
effect :.  .  .  "not  merely  on  account  of  the  common  consent  of  the  Church, 
but  much  more  from  the  witness  of  the  Holy  Spirit  and  the  inward  convic- 
tion He  gives  us;  for  it  is  He  who  teaches  us  to  distinguish  them  from  other 
ecclesiastical  writings."  The  Anglican  Articles  are  even  silent  concerning 
the  inward  witness  and  content  themselves  with  saying:  "In  the  name 
of  the  Holy  Scriptures  we  understand  those  canonical  books  of  whose 
authority  there  was  never  any  doubt  in  the  Church.  ...  All  the  books  of 
the  New  Testament  as  they  are  commonly  received  we  do  receive  and 
account  them  canonical." 


Catholicism  285 

principle  might  lead  different  men  to  construct  different 
canons,  that  is  to  say,  might  result  in  there  being  no 
canon  at  all.  The  Swiss  Reformers  perceived  this,  but 
they  held  to  the  principle.  No  Helvetic  Confession  gives 
a  list  of  canonical  Scriptures;  the  faithful  are  left  to  the 
guidance  of  the  Spirit  in  determination  of  the  books 
to  be  accepted  as  Holy  Scripture.  Other  thurches  de- 
clined to  go  to  such  lengths.  Their  Confessions  published 
an  authoritative  catalogue  of  the  books  of  the  New 
Testament  such  as  it  was  in  everyone's  hands,  and  with 
this  all  further  discussion  of  the  canonicity  of  any  book 
was  arrested. 

A  somewhat  different  principle  had  been  announced  by 
Luther  to  determine  the  canonical  claims  of  a  given  book 
and  to  estimate  its  value.  It  was  his  intense  conviction 
that  the  whole  of  Christianity  was  summed  up  in  the 
theses  of  salvation  by  grace  through  the  expiation  of 
Christ,  and  of  justification  by  faith  alone  to  the  exclusion 
of  all  merit  by  works.  This  is  what  he  called  the  Gospel, 
and  for  him  this  was  the  scriptural  revelation.  While 
Calvin  declares  in  general  terms  that  the  Spirit  within  us 
testifies  to  the  divine  inspiration  of  the  Scriptures,  Luther 
insists  that  what  decides  the  question  of  inspiration  is  the 
teaching  of  each  book  concerning  Christ  and  salvation. 
This  is  also  the  test  of  the  relative  worth  of  the  several 
books,  and  accordingly  the  Gospel  of  John,  the  Epistles  of 
Paul  to  the  Romans  and  Galatians  and  the  first  Epistle  of 
Peter  are  "the  very  kernel  and  marrow  of  all  the  books." 
The  first  three  gospels  are  of  greatly  inferior  rank,  for 
they  deal  with  the  works  of  Christ,  which  profit  us  noth- 
ing, rather  than  with  his  teaching  which  leads  to  salvation. 
As  to  the  Apocalypse  he  agreed  with  Zwingli;  Hebrews 
was  wrong  on  the  Atonement,  Jude  was  of  no  use,  and 
James  was  worse  than  worthless.  Whatever  we  think 
of  Luther's  principle  it  was  one  that  offered  the  Reformers 


286  Catholicism 

a  stronger  position  on  the  scriptural  question.  The  sub- 
jective criterion  left  it  possible  for  one  to  take  his  prefer- 
ences and  prejudices  for  the  witness  of  the  Spirit,  but  when 
Luther,  resolved  to  know  nothing  but  Christ  crucified, 
took  the  Protestant  theology  for  the  measure  of  canoni- 
city,  he  found,  as  it  were,  a  rudder  to  steer  to  some 
issue  the  discussion  which  had  drifted  so  long  upon  the 
fluctuations  of  opinion  and  the  cross  currents  of  opposing 
testimony.  And  if  we  object  that  in  this  he  subordinates 
Scripture  to  his  Pauline,  or  Augustinian,  system,  he  might 
reply  with  logic  on  his  side  that  truth  must  take  precedence 
of  the  witness  who  attests  it.  The  Humanists  might  have 
approached  the  Scriptures  from  the  viewpoint  of  historical 
criticism  and  in  the  dispassionate  temper  of  the  Scholar, 
but  to  the  Reformers  the  Canon  was  not  a  collection  of 
the  writings  of  a  certain  class  of  persons  at  a  certain  date ; 
it  was  the  record  of  inspired  utterances  revealing  religious 
truths  of  transcendent  interest.  It  follows,  Luther  con- 
tends, that  the  content  and  spirit  of  each  book  must  of 
itself  decide  its  canonicity,  and  it  is  on  the  ground  of  dog- 
matic incompatibility  that  he  rejects  James  and  Jude,  Heb- 
rews and  the  Apocalypse.  The  authority  of  Scripture  then 
is  not  supreme;  the  supreme  authority  is  his  "Gospel"  of 
a  crucified  Saviour.  His  issue  with  the  Church  is  not  the 
opposition  between  Scripture  and  tradition,  but  between 
the  claims  of  a  personal  religious  belief  and  the  discipline 
of  the  Catholic  organisation.  Hence  while  the  doctrinal 
criterion  of  inspired  Scripture,  as  more  objective  than  the 
intuitional,  might  seem  somewhat  steadier  and  likely  to 
issue  in  safer  conclusions,  it  is  plain  that  after  all  neither 
could  lead  to  any  conclusive  definition  of  the  Canon. 
Such  an  open,  indefinite  condition  of  the  question,  which 
left  room  for  freedom  and  variety  of  judgment  on  points 
of  detail,  Luther  and  his  fellow  workers  may  have  regarded 
with  equanimity,  but  with  the  rise  of  the  confessional 


Catholicism  287 

schools  in  a  later  generation  the  Protestant  spirit  lost  the 
fresh  energy  of  its  dayspring,  its  estimates  of  Scripture 
began  to  borrow  from  the  external  evidence  of  history  the 
support  it  had  formerly  been  able  to  disregard,  and  the 
imperious  demand  to  define  and  systematise,  to  reduce 
everything  to  rule,  finally  brought  the  Swis&and  German 
theologians  to  the  position  taken  by  the  French  and 
Dutch,  which  was  nothing  else  than  acceptance  of  the 
Canon  established  by  the  Church.1 

The  singular  history  of  the  Canon  carries  with  it  its 
own  commentary,  but  I  would  call  attention  to  a  few 
points  which  our  brief  survey  has  brought  to  our  notice. 
It  is  apparent  that  the  Canon  as  finally  established  was 
formed  on  no  principle  and  by  no  method  that  would 
ensure  the  collection  of  the  best  and  most  valuable  works 
of  the  Christian  literature,  for  the  intrinsic  merit  of  a 
book  selected  was  not  in  question.  Its  spiritual  power,  its 
value  for  religion,  was  little  if  at  all  regarded,  while  a 
divine  authority  was  conferred  upon  it  extrinsically  on 
quite  worthless  evidence  to  its  authorship.  It  is  said 
that  a  selection  according  to  merit  had  already  been  made 
in  the  public  readings,  and  that  the  bishops  and  theologians 
from  the  second  to  the  fifth  centuries  practically  only 
ratified  existing  usage.  It  is  true,  as  I  have  recognised, 
that  the  instinctive  judgment  of  religious  feeling  was 
effective  in  determining  the  choice  of  certain  books  it 
found  congenial  and  helpful,  but  this  was  only  one  of  a 
complex  of  factors  that  went  to  making  up  the  conse- 
crated collections  of  the  churches.  Vague  tradition,  local 
prepossession,  individual  taste,  practical  needs,  relations 
more  or  less  intimate  between  the  various  churches,  the 
wider  or  more  limited  circulation  of  a  book, — all  such 

1  The  interesting  history  of  the  transformation  of  ideas  that  led  to  this 
reaction  in  favor  of  the  authority  of  tradition  is  sketched  by  Reuss  in  the 
seventeenth  chapter  of  his  valuable  work. 


288  Catholicism 

loose  and  random  influences  left  the  outcome  largely  to 
mere  chance.  Moreover  this  intuitional  criticism  of 
which  so  much  is  made  did  not  work  so  as  to  support  the 
theory  that  it  is  the  virtual  maker  of  the  Canon.  If  it 
discerned  the  high  merit  of  the  four  gospels  and  the 
Pauline  Epistles,  it  was  no  less  ready  to  stamp  with  its 
approval  such  works  as  the  gospel  of  the  Hebrews,  the 
Acts  of  Paul,  the  Epistles  of  Barnabas  and  Clement,  the 
Shepherd  of  Hermas  and  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter.  In  the 
case  of  these  writings  the  selection  of  the  churches  was  not 
allowed  to  stand,  and  the  assertion  that  the  ecclesiastical 
authorities  only  gave  the  force  of  law  to  what  was  already 
consecrated  by  custom  is  not  in  accord  with  the  facts. 
Whatever  consideration  they  extended  to  the  usage  of 
the  churches,  the  decision  of  canonical  questions  remained 
with  the  bishops,  and  they  did  not  hesitate  to  exercise 
their  authority,  as  we  have  seen  in  the  early  case  of  Sera- 
pion  and  the  gospel  of  Peter.  It  is  difficult  to  ascribe  the 
fixing  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  to  the ' '  marvelous  tact ' ' 
of  religious  sentiment,  divinely  guided  in  its  choice,  when 
we  find  the  African  Councils  ruling  out  the  books  mentioned 
above,  with  many  others  more  or  less  in  favor  with  the 
churches,  while  they  decreed  the  canonicity  of  the  five 
Catholic  Epistles — James,  II  Peter,  Jude,  II  and  III  John 
— which  now  "emerge  without  warning  from  obscurity" 
(Jiilicher),  and  of  Hebrews  and  the  Apocalypse  each  of 
which  was  rejected  by  half  of  the  Church  Catholic. 

Owing  to  the  proscription  of  uncanonical  writings  we 
have  probably  lost  valuable  historical  material.  The 
Acts  of  Paul,  for  instance,  might  have  been  of  great  ser- 
vice in  correction  of  what  is  untrustworthy  and  misleading 
in  the  canonical  Acts  of  the  Apostles.  The  historical 
criticism  of  the  New  Testament  inaugurated  by  Baur 
has  achieved  so  much  that  it  seems  deplorable  it  should 
be  shut  out  from  the  wider  field  where  it  might  have 


Catholicism  289 

gathered  a  fuller  harvest.  Even  if  it  be  admitted  that  the 
literature  which  has  perished,  or  only  survives  in  scattered 
fragments,  was  of  distinctly  inferior  quality,  still  it  would 
help  to  give  fuller  and  clearer  expression  to  the  life  and 
thought  of  early  Christian  times.  Shakespeare  is  in  a 
class  by  himself,  but  if  the  folio  of  1623  had  been  canonised, 
we  should  have  lost  all  the  Elizabethan  Drama,  except 
the  seven  worthless  plays  it  mistakenly  assumes  to  be 
Shakespearian. x  But  it  is  a  fairly  safe  assertion  that  a 
collection  of  the  best  Christian  writings  would  have  been 
somewhat  different  from  that  which  we  possess  in  the 
New  Testament,  and  that  the  rule  of  apostolicity  worked 
disastrously  both  to  keep  out  and  to  let  in.  That  rule  was 
enforced  by  the  Church  under  its  oligarchic  constitution, 
and  in  effect  mainly  by  a  majority  of  the  Councils  of 
Hippo  and  Carthage — if  not  by  the  voice  of  Augustine 
alone. a  But  the  apostolicity  decreed  was  a  mere  assump- 
tion. No  evidence  was  ever  produced  for  the  highly 
improbable  supposition  that  any  of  the  Twelve  were 
writers  of  narratives  or  letters.  Of  the  twenty-seven 
books  of  the  New  Testament  only  six  Epistles  of  St.  Paul 
have  any  valid  claim  to  apostolic  authorship  in  the 
narrower  sense  the  term  had  by  this  time  acquired.3 

On  the  whole  the  judgment  of  a  German  critic  can 
hardly  be  disputed  that  the  historian  of  early  Christian 

1  "We  have  no  right  to  single  out  the  most  meritorious  productions  of 
the  age — four,  for  example,  out  of  hundreds  of  gospels — and  while  paying 
unlimited  reverence  to  these  as  the  sole  inspired  repositories  of  Christian 
verity,  to  anathematise  the  rest  as  heretical.  All  have  a  value  when 
considered  as  indices  of  the  mental  life  of  the  period  of  their  origin." 
Mackay,  The  Rise  and  Progress  of  Christianity,  14. 

a "  Augustine  was  the  animating  spirit  of  both  Councils,  so  that  they 
may  be  taken  as  expressing  his  views  on  the  subject."  Davidson,  Enc. 
Brit.,  Art.  "Canon." 

3  It  was  not  agreed  whether  the  writer  of  Jude  was  Judas  the  Zealot  or 
Judas  the  brother  of  the  Lord;  but  if  it  was  not  certain  that  he  was  the  one 
or  the  other,  how  be  sure  that  he  was  either? 
19 


290  Catholicism 

literature  must  ignore  the  distinction  made  by  the  Canon 
between  its  productions.  And  this  brings  us  to  the  point 
of  prime  importance  that  remains  to  be  emphasised: 
It  is  not  that  the  Canon,  made  as  it  was  made,  is  arbi- 
trary, defective  and  unsatisfactory;  it  is  that  the  Canon 
in  its  whole  nature  and  notion  is  a  huge  mistake,  that  it 
were  better  there  never  had  been  a  Canon  at  all.  Can- 
onisation created  an  artificial  distinction,  unknown  to 
early  times,  according  to  which  certain  books  were  selected 
out  of  the  current  literature  and  set  forth  by  the  Church, 
as  a  collection  of  inspired  Scripture,  a  divinely  authorita- 
tive revelation,  determined  and  established  as  such  by  ec- 
clesiastical law.  It  postulated  the  primitive  notions  of  a 
revelation  and  inspiration  operating  mechanically  upon  a 
passive  subject  which  took  rise  in  times  of  intellectual 
darkness,  and  which  to  one  who  encounters  them  today 
in  the  light  of  modern  knowledge  can  only  appear  childish 
and  silly.  From  these  notions  the  Protestants  failed  to 
free  themselves,  and  so  made  it  impossible  for  them  to 
advance  upon  the  line  opened  by  the  first  generation 
of  Reformers.  The  denial  of  the  right  of  a  Canon  to  give 
authority  to  books  of  Scripture,  and  reliance  upon  the 
inner  witness  in  the  Christian  consciousness,  should  have 
led  to  an  abandonment  of  the  underlying  assumption  of  a 
revelation  communicating  definite  doctrines,  and  of  an 
inspiration  suspending  the  faculties  of  men,  and  residing 
in  the  words  written  at  dictation.  Histories  and  letters 
written  by  men  for  men,  stamped  with  their  writers' 
individuality,  issuing  from  a  religious  experience  unique 
in  depth  and  intensity  which  they  would  bring  others  to 
share,  touched  with  the  fire  of  a  divine  influence  that  is 
ever  seeking  the  spirit  of  man, — these  canonisation  has 
turned  into  a  Pagan  book  of  oracles,  infallible,  inerrant 
in  its  every  deliverance.1  To  canonisation  we  owe  the 
1  In  Andrew  White's  Seven  Great  Statesmen  (pp.  85  and  123)  we  may  read 


Catholicism  291 

Bibliolatry  which  has  locked  up  the  Scripture  and  thrown 
away  the  key.  The  superstitious  reverence  paid  to  a 
supernatural  Book,  let  down  as  it  were  direct  from 
heaven,  is  literally  a  fetich-worship,  or  that  of  an  inani- 
mate object  taken  for  the  seat  of  a  divine*  presence  and 
power;  and  this  has  shut  men  out  from  all  intelligent 
reading  of  the  Bible,  from  all  appreciation  of  its  living 
reality,  its  real  significance,  and  its  priceless  value  to 
religion,  as  the  history  of  Protestantism  attests.  The 
Holy  Scriptures  have  been  held  in  veneration,  but  have 
been  little  read,  except  by  certain  pious  Christians,  per- 
functorily, and  as  an  edifying  exercise — a  chapter  a  day. 
As  late  as  1873  Arnold's  simple  suggestion  or  reminder 
that  writings  covering  a  thousand  years,  published  in  one 
volume  that  we  call  the  Bible,  are  a  literature  and  to  be 
studied  as  a  literature  came  to  many  with  the  shock  of  a 
startling  novelty.  Since  then  old  views  have  undergone 
a  change.  It  is  matter  for  thankfulness  in  the  interests  of 
religion  that  a  gradual  popularisation  of  the  results  of 
modern  scholarship  is  bringing  to  the  light  of  day  a  new 
Bible  which  is  the  old,  freed  from  age-long  misconceptions ; 
and  the  removal  of  an  adventitious  sacredness  is  setting 
free  the  intimate  appeal  of  its  inherent  power  to  the 
intelligence  as  to  the  hearts  of  men.1 

how  during  the  wars  of  religion  the  authority  of  Holy  Scripture  was  in- 
voked to  sanction  all  manner  of  inhuman  cruelty  and  crime. 

1  "The  condition  of  arriving  at  a  true  appreciation  of  the  Bible  is  that 
we  let  it  take  its  place  amongst  the  literatures  of  the  world,  that  we  do  not 
fence  it  off  or  separate  it  or  guard  it  in  any  special  way.  .  .  .  Pygmalion 
wrought  in  marble  the  figure  of  a  nymph.  Stately  and  beautiful  her  form, 
but  she  had  no  life  in  her.  Then  at  his  prayer  the  statue  descended  from 
the  pedestal  and  became  flesh  with  all  the  glowing  loveliness  of  a  living 
woman,  and  a  woman's  heart  beat  within  her  bosom.  So  the  Bible  has 
come  down  from  the  pedestal  on  which  it  stood,  not  to  be  dishonored,  but 
to  be  quickened  with  the  life  of  our  humanity  and  to  be  the  companion,  the 
comforter,  the  inspirer  of  our  daily  life."  R.  A.  Armstrong,  God  and  the 
Soul,  172. 


292  Catholicism 

5.     The  Church 
a.     The  Pauline  Churches 

The  organisation  of  the  Christian  churches  in  its 
rudimentary  phase  and  its  development  during  the  first 
three  centuries  is  a  subject  to  which  scholars  have  de- 
voted much  learned  research,  a  research  which  would 
have  been  more  fruitful  in  results  had  it  not  been  prompted 
so  largely  by  a  desire  to  find  in  primitive  practice  support 
for  various  ecclesiastical  theories  rather  than  to  bring 
to  light  the  facts  of  history.  I  have  no  space  to  fol- 
low the  course  of  that  history,  but  it  will  be  enough  for  my 
purpose  to  point  out  the  contrast  between  the  earli- 
est condition  of  the  Christian  communities  and  its  com- 
plete transformation  in  the  later  day  of  the  Catholic 
Church. 

The  Acts  of  the  Apostles  opens  with  a  description  of 
the  infant  church  of  Jerusalem,  according  to  traditions 
gathered  by  the  author  half  a  century  after  the  events 
to  which  they  refer.  Though  of  quite  uncertain  authority, 
in  the  main  the  picture  it  presents  appears  to  be  taken  from 
life.  The  little  group  of  brethren  assembled  in  an  upper 
room  enlarges  with  new  adherents  gained  by  the  preaching 
of  Jesus  the  Christ.  They  are  of  one  heart  and  one  mind 
in  their  common  life;  they  make  over  their  possessions 
to  the  community;  they  give  themselves  to  prayer  and 
praise  and  mutual  exhortation,  and  all  come  together  at 
the  common  meals  of  the  spiritual  family.  They  are 
eagerly  awaiting  the  coming  of  their  Lord,  and  their  in- 
difference to  all  material  interests,  their  complete  de- 
tachment from  all  worldly  occupations  are  a  natural 
consequence  of  their  eschatological  obsessions.  A  fur- 
ther consequence  is  the  penury  which  before  long  will 


Catholicism  293 

fall  upon  the  community  of  Jerusalem  and  will  find  re- 
lief from  the  subsidies  collected  by  the  Apostle  to  the 
Gentiles. 

After  the  expulsion  of  the  Hellenists  frtfm  Jerusalem, 
which  left  the  Judaising  Christians  in  unopposed  ascend- 
ancy, a  change  occurs  in  the  aspect  of  the  Christian  com- 
munity. The  leadership  has  passed  from  Peter  to  James, 
the  brother  of  the  Lord,  to  whom  this  relationship  gave  a 
commanding  prestige,  and  with  the  advent  of  this  person- 
age there  appear  indications  of  a  rudimentary  organisa- 
tion on  the  model  of  the  Jewish  synagogue.  Beside  the 
Apostles  and  the  brethren  there  is  mention  of  Presbyters 
(A.  V.  Elders)  charged  with  certain  administrative  func- 
tions, or  acting  with  the  Apostles  as  a  deliberative  Council 
(Acts  xi,  30;  xv,  4,  6,  22,  23).  When  or  how  these  Pres- 
byters took  rise  we  are  not  told,  but  they  can  scarcely  be 
regarded  as  an  official  order  instituted  by  formal  procedure- 
To  infer  from  the  name  their  identity  with  the  Presbyters 
of  later  days  would  be  to  miss  the  historical  perspective 
and  put  on  the  same  plane  things  separated  by  long 
distance.  It  would  seem  that  the  tacit  demands  of  the 
community  created  their  supply.  Some  persons  had  to 
be  entrusted  to  receive  the  contributions  brought  by 
Barnabas  and  Paul,  and  take  charge  of  their  equitable  dis- 
tribution. When  it  had  to  be  decided  what  attitude  the 
community  should  adopt  toward  the  converted  Pagans,  a 
question  so  difficult  and  likely  to  rouse  such  passionate 
excitement  could  not  safely  be  submitted  to  the  general 
assembly  without  previous  consideration  by  a  more 
restricted  body — just  as  today  a  legislative  measure  is 
referred  to  a  committee  before  its  presentation  to  the 
parliament  or  congress.  It  is  immaterial  that  the  account 
of  the  proceedings  in  Acts  xv  is  contradicted  by  St.  Paul; 
whatever  took  place  on  the  occasion  of  this  visit  of  the 


294  Catholicism 

Apostle,  at  some  time  a  situation  must  have  presented  it- 
self to  call  for  similar  action  on  the  part  of  the  Elders. 
At  first  it  was  probably  those  of  highest  standing  and 
most  respected  who  naturally  came  to  the  front  and  came 
to  be  called  by  this  familiar  name.1  Such  authority,  or 
rather  influence,  as  they  exercised  would  be  due  to  their 
personal  qualities,  to  the  recognised  ability  and  devotion 
with  which  they  served  the  interests  of  the  community. 
At  the  same  time,  the  constitution  of  the  synagogue  must 
have  come  of  itself  to  the  mind  of  the  Jewish  Christians, 
and  with  this  the  title  Elder  would  take  on  an  official 
character.  These  sectaries  of  Jerusalem  formed  a  little 
society  apart  in  the  midst  of  the  great  Jewish  society, 
and  when  the  necessities  of  their  common  life  urged  them 
to  create  some  organisation  of  their  own,  it  was  naturally 
assimilated  to  that  of  Jews  in  foreign  lands  subject  to 
alien  authority.  'And  so  in  the  course  of  a  few  years 
there  appears  in  this  earliest  Christian  community  a  group 
of  Elders,  like  those  of  the  Jewish  synagogue,  acting  as  a 
council  of  direction.  Acts  xv  preserves  a  Judeo-Christian 
tradition  which  reveals  the  ambition  of  this  presbyteral 
council  to  take  to  itself  the  same  supreme  authority  over 
the  newly  founded  Christian  churches  as  that  exercised 
over  all  Judaism  by  the  Sanhedrim  of  Jerusalem.  It  was 
a  dream  not  to  be  realised.  The  numerical  superiority 
rapidly  gained  by  the  Gentile  Christians,  the  break-up  of 
the  mother  Church  at  the  approach  of  the  legions  of  Titus, 
shattered  these  schemes  of  imperial  domination;  but  the 
ecclesiastical  conception  which  inspired  them  lived  on, 
Jewish  in  origin,  antagonistic  to  the  teachings  of  Jesus,  but 

1  The  Elders  of  the  Synagogue,  the  Senatus  or  yepowla  of  the  municipali- 
ties, were  terms  expressive  of  a  seniority  in  years  that  no  longer  had  a  literal 
significance,  but  they  witnessed  to  the  tradition  handed  down  from  the  as- 
semblies of  primitive  society  in  which  the  heads  of  families  took  precedence 
and  authority  was  the  prerogative  of  age.  "  It  is  not  length  of  days  that  makes 
the  true  Elder, "  observes  Philo,  "  but  a  life  given  to  wisdom  and  virtu." 


Catholicism  295 

destined  to  a  full  development  in  his  Church.  What  the 
Elders  of  Jerusalem  attempted  the  General  Councils  car- 
ried into  effect,  and  ruled  the  religious  lifo;  of  Christen- 
dom until  the  evolution,  long  since  accomplished  in  the 
several  churches,  finished  its  course  in  the  Church  Uni- 
versal and  the  conciliar  authority  yielded  to  the  papal 
despotism. 

While  these  Christian  Jews,  their  vision  bounded  by 
the  horizon  of  Palestine,  were  content  to  win  some  few 
adherents  in  the  Holy  City,  where  the  Messiah  should 
establish  his  throne  and  whither  he  should  summon 
his  elect  from  the  four  quarters  of  the  earth,  the  Hellen- 
istic Christians  had  already  entered  upon  that  career  of 
missionary  activity  which  was  to  lead  to  the  conversion 
of  the  world.  It  was  only  giving  a  new  direction  to  efforts 
of  long  standing.  Monotheistic  religions,  appealing  to 
all  mankind,  are  in  their  nature  missionary  religions,  and 
the  Jews  of  the  Dispersion  were  zealous  propagandists 
of  their  faith.  Difficult  as  was  their  task  they  were 
surprisingly  successful,  and  wherever  there  were  Jewish 
colonies  the  synagogues  were  thronged  with  proselytes. 
It  is  true  that  to  obtain  such  a  result  Judaism  had  to 
adapt  itself  to  the  environment.  It  was  not  only  preached 
in  Greek,  but  preached,  as  M.  Reville  puts  it,  "a  la 
grecque."  Much  that  was  harsh  and  repellant  in  the 
character  of  the  native  Jew  had  become  softened  and  re- 
fined by  contact  with  a  more  cultured  society,  and  so  too 
the  religion  of  the  Hellenists  lost  something  of  the  hard 
narrowness  of  Palestine  under  the  influence  of  the  genial 
Greek  spirit,  and  was  enlarged  and  enriched  by  assimilat- 
ing the  best  and  most  helpful  ideas  of  Greek  wisdom. 
And  yet,  however  attractive  to  serious-minded  Pagans 
was  this  blend  of  prophetic  teachings  with  theological 
speculations  of  Platonism  and  high  precepts  of  Stoic 
morality,  the  dead  weight  of  the  legal  observances  re- 


296  Catholicism 

mained  a  serious  obstacle  to  the  advance  of  Hellenistic 
Judaism,  in  spite  of  the  attenuations  and  accommodations 
it  was  obliged  to  allow  the  converts.  And  the  question 
of  the  Law  made  trouble  for  many  a  Hellenist  Jew.  As 
an  idealist,  trained  in  the  allegorical  methods,  outward 
rites  and  forms  were  to  him  merely  symbols  and  their 
moral  significance  the  only  thing  of  worth;  yet  as  a  Jew 
he  must  remain  faithful  in  practice  to  the  Mosaic  ordi- 
nances. 

In  his  valuable  work,  Les  Origines  de  VEpiscopat,  M. 
Jean  Reville  has  pointed  out  the  analogy  between  the 
situation  thus  created  and  that  which  arose  in  the  Chris- 
tian Church  on  the  eve  of  the  Reformation.  Erasmus 
and  his  colleagues  missed  no  occasion  of  declaring  that 
the  practices  of  catholic  devotion — fastings,  processions, 
pilgrimages — were  in  themselves  of  no  religious  value, 
but  only  the  repentance  and  inward  communion  with 
Christ  of  which  they  were  the  outward  manifestation. 
Upon  this  some  began  to  ask  themselves  why  these  useless 
observances  should  be  kept  up,  and  the  bolder  spirits 
even  questioned  whether  they  were  not  harmful  to  the 
spiritual  life  and  of  a  tendency  to  deceive  the  Christian 
concerning  the  true  conditions  of  salvation.  But  when 
the  Reformers,  convinced  of  the  deplorable  effects  of  such 
religious  materialism,  called  for  the  suppression  of  these 
ceremonial  practices,  neither  Erasmus  nor  the  other 
Humanists  were  prepared  to  draw  the  necessary  conclu- 
sion from  their  own  premises,  and  the  practical  realisation 
of  their  principles  had  to  be  the  work  of  an  ecclesiastical 
revolution.  So  in  the  synagogues  of  the  Hellenic  world 
all  tended  logically  to  the  abandonment  of  the  practices 
of  Jewish  legalism.  The  rapid  influx  of  converts  to  the 
religion  of  Jehovah,  not  Jews  by  race,  suggested  the 
possibility  of  a  covenant  with  the  Eternal  founded  on 
this  common  worship  without  regard  to  ethnic  distinc- 


Catholicism  297 

tions.  And  the  fact  that  these  fellow- worshippers  were 
not  subjected  to  all  the  requirements  of  the  Law  led 
insensibly  toward  a  view  of  its  observances  £s  less  vitally 
important  than  the  moral  and  religious  disposition  of 
which  they  were  the  sign.  Such  tendencies  were  indeed 
latent  and  inactive ;  it  needed  an  ecclesiastical  revolution 
to  bring  them  to  full  issue.  But  just  as  the  Reformers 
of  the  sixteenth  century  could  never  have  attained  their 
ends  if  the  spiritual  renaissance  of  Humanism  had  not 
shaken  the  hold  of  ecclesiastical  authority  upon  the  minds 
of  men,  so  the  Apostle  Paul  could  not  have  founded  the 
Christian  Church  but  for  the  silent  evolution  in  the  Jew- 
ish communities  on  pagan  soil  of  the  elements  of  re- 
ligious universalism — a  spiritual  monotheism  freed  from 
Jewish  limitations,  a  religion  already  virtually  denation- 
alised. 

Such  were  the  conditions  that  made  the  Hellenistic 
synagogue  the  cradle  of  the  new-born  faith.  The  service 
of  the  synagogue  lent  itself  readily  to  the  advancement  of 
new  views  and  teachings,  and  as  Jesus  had  preached 
the  Gospel  in  the  synagogues  of  Galilee,  so  Paul  and  the 
other  missionaries  found  in  these  Sabbath  assemblies 
the  most  favorable  opportunity  for  the  preaching  of  the 
Christ.  Scarcely  ever  did  that  preaching  fail  to  win  some 
of  its  hearers,  but  it  was  not  long  in  making  trouble. 
For  all  their  liberal  education  the  mass  of  the  Hellenist 
Jews  were  not  prepared  to  break  with  the  Mosaic  Law  and 
with  their  Palestinian  brethren,  and  sooner  or  later, 
according  to  the  circumstances  of  each  case,  Paul  and  his 
friends  were  expelled  from  the  synagogue  and  its  door 
was  finally  closed  against  them.  And  now  it  was  a 
question  of  holding  together  the  little  group  of  disciples 
who  abandoned  the  synagogue  to  follow  the  Apostle.  At 
first  a  handful  of  believers  gathered  in  the  house  of  one  of 
their  members  forming  what  was  called  an  l*KXir)da  ««T'  ol*ov. 


298  Catholicism 

The  sixteenth  chapter  of  Romans,  which  was  originally 
part  of  a  letter  addressed  to  an  Asiatic  community,  men- 
tions a  number  of  persons  who  evidently  offered  their 
homes  for  such  assemblies,  and  the  same  thing  is  told 
us  of  others  in  Acts,  Corinthians,  and  Philemon.  Later 
on  a  hall  was  hired,  as  at  Ephesus  where  Paul  taught  in 
the  school  of  the  philosopher  Tyrannus.  In  this  way  the 
Christians  were  provided  with  a  meeting-place  to  which 
they  could  draw  in  adherents  from  among  the  people  of 
the  city  and  where  they  could  unite  in  the  bond  of  a  com- 
mon faith  and  life — the  faith  that  Christ  had  come  to 
save  from  sin  and  death,  and  the  life  of  being  good  and 
showing  love  to  the  brethren.  In  large  towns,  such  as 
Corinth,  there  seem  to  have  been  several  such  places  of 
assembly,  but  in  the  eyes  of  Paul  all  the  Christians  of  the 
city  formed  a  single  community.  More  than  that,  all 
the  local  ecclesiai  scattered  through  Greece  and  Asia  felt 
themselves  to  be  so  many  members  of  a  single  Ecclesia, 
the  fellowship  of  all  who  died  with  Christ  to  sin  and  rose 
with  him  to  life  eternal.  For  Paul  this  was  the  true 
Church  of  Christ:  catholic  in  that  it  embraced  all  Chris- 
tians of  whatever  nationality  or  social  condition — Jew  or 
Greek,  male  or  female,  bond  or  free — but  purely  spiritual 
and,  as  the  Reformers  called  it,  invisible;  without  any 
corporate  organisation,  without  any  conditions  or  tests 
of  membership  other  than  the  individual  communion  of 
each  member  with  the  Lord  Christ,  so  that  in  him  was  the 
unity  of  his  Church. J  And  if  the  name  Church  (Ecclesia) 
given  to  this  spiritual  unity  of  all  Christian  believers  was 
at  the  same  time  the  name  of  each  individual  community, 
it  was  not  only  that  the  part  was  in  the  whole  but  that 

1 1  Cor.  xii,  12-31 ;  xv,  9;  Gal.  i,  13;  iii,  28;  Rom.  xii,  5.  A  later  writer 
gives  expression  to  the  same  ideal  conception  of  the  Church:  "God's 
firm  foundation  standeth,  having  this  seal,  The  Lord  knoweth  them  that 
are  his."  II  Tim.  ii,  19. 


Catholicism  299 

the  whole  was  represented  in  the  part,  and  St.  Paul's 
Letter  is  addressed  "To  the  Church  of  Code  which  is  at 
Corinth."  His  converts  felt  that  they  belonged  to  the 
Church  as  a  whole  through  their  attachment  to  the  local 
community. 

It  is  evident  that  the  Church  is  much  more  to  the  Apostle 
than  a  religious  community  with  a  special  constitution ;  funda- 
mentally the  Church  is  to  him  the  new  humanity  itself,  up- 
lifted by  its  unity  with  the  Crucified  and  Risen  out  of  the 
whole  remaining  mass  of  mankind. x 

It  was  not  to  plant  a  string  of  little  isolated  fraternities 
that  the  Apostle  broke  with  the  religion  of  his  fathers; 
rather  he  aspired  to  found  a  vast  society  spread  over  the 
whole  world,  united  by  a  common  faith  and  inspiration. 
If  we  realise  the  fervor  of  that  inspiration  and  how  the 
Pauline  churches  were  seething  with  excitement,  we  shall 
find  the  source  of  the  power  of  expansion,  of  future  pro- 
mise, latent  in  these  little  conventicles,  but  we  shall  not 
look  to  find  even  the  germs  of  a  later  ecclesiastical  organi- 
sation. The  early  Church  was  a  fraternal  association 
that  believed  itself  the  precursor  of  the  Kingdom  of  God 
on  earth.  In  its  very  nature  such  constitution  as  it  had 
was  provisional:  when  Messiah  should  come  he  would 
establish  the  institutions  of  his  Kingdom.  And  when  we 
consider  of  what  diverse  human  types  these  primitive 
communities  were  composed — deserters  from  the  syna- 
gogue, Pagans  scarcely  detached  from  their  old  religious 
associations,  slaves  and  freedmen  catching  at  the  hope  of  a 
great  salvation,  restless  spirits  eager  for  new  revelations, 
symbolists  of  the  Alexandrine  school,  and  Gnostics  living 
in  an  imaginary  world,  simple  honest  souls  giving  them- 
selves to  the  cause  of  Christ  with  all  their  native  good- 

1  Wrede,  Paul,  119. 


300  Catholicism 

ness,  and  sinners  of  every  sort  seeking  refuge  in  a  society 
that  offered  pardon  for  the  past — it  is  plain  how  difficult 
it  would  be  for  such  heterogeneous  elements  to  coalesce 
under  any  forms  of  settled  order.  The  Pauline  com- 
munity is  a  pure  democracy  and  the  equality  of  all  its 
members  is  complete,  for  the  spiritual  independence  of 
every  Christian  is  an  integral  element  in  the  conception 
of  the  Christian  life. x  All  is  trusted  to  mutual  good  will 
and  the  spirit  of  brotherhood,  and  in  the  absence  of  any 
governing  authority  there  appears  in  the  Church  of 
Corinth,  at  least,  something  like  an  anarchy  of  individu- 
alism. The  Apostle  Paul,  it  is  true,  enjoyed  a  prestige 
such  as  the  Greek  societies  accorded  to  their  founders, 
but  his  authority  was  purely  moral  and  personal  and  its 
exercise  demanded  the  greatest  caution.  In  dealing  with 
the  disorders  and  dissensions  that  agitate  the  community 
he  appeals  to  the  judgment  of  his  readers;  he  suggests, 
leaving  it  to  them  to  act  upon  his  suggestions ;  he  tries  to 
persuade,  but  does  not  attempt  to  command.  Corinth 
at  this  date  was  a  cosmopolitan  city  where  ideas,  tradi- 
tions, habits  or  tendencies  of  mind  the  most  diverse, 
mingling  or  conflicting,  gathered  around  the  common 
hope  in  Christ.  The  Corinthian  turbulence,  the  dis- 
orderly manifestations  of  religious  exaltation,  were  at 
all  events  a  sign  of  vigorous  life.  It  is  plain  from  the  Apos- 
tle's Letter  that  he  looked  upon  this  Church  with  a  spe- 
cial fondness,  such  as  one  feels  for  a  highly  gifted  but 

1  "Ye  know  that  the  rulers  of  the  Gentiles  lord  it  over  them,  and  their 
great  ones  exercise  authority  over  them.  It  shall  not  be  so  among  you;  but 
whosoever  would  be  great  among  you  shall  be  your  minister,  and  whosoever 
would  be  first  among  you  shall  be  your  servant.  ...  Be  ye  not  called 
Rabbi,  for  one  is  your  teacher  and  all  ye  are  brethren.  And  call  no  man 
your  father  on  the  earth,  for  one  is  your  Father  which  is  in  heaven."  In 
these  words  Jesus  condemns  the  principle  of  hierarchy  which  places  one 
class  under  the  tutelage  of  another,  and  asserts  the  fraternal  equality  of 
Christians  in  their  common  relation  to  the  heavenly  Father. 


Catholicism  301 

unruly  child  from  whom  great  things  may  be  expected. 
So  then,  with  one  exception  to  be  noted  latter,  there  are 
no  regular  officials  in  the  communities  to  which  St.  Paul's 
authentic  letters  are  addressed.  What  might  appear  to 
be  office  is  not  an  exercise  of  authority,  but  a  render- 
ing of  service.  All  such  service  is  freely  offered  and 
each  man  makes  himself  useful  to  the  community  in 
the  line  of  his  special  aptitude  or  gift,  which  is  held 
to  be  a  divine  commission.  The  Epistles  give  us  two 
enumerations  of  these  social  functions  in  the  primitive 
community : 

God  hath  set  some  in  the  church,  first  Apostles,  secondly 
prophets,  thirdly  teachers,  then  miraculous  powers,  then  gifts 
of  healing,  helps,  governments,  kinds  of  tongues  (I  Cor. 
xii,  28). 

Having  then  gifts  differing  according  to  the  grace  that 
was  given  us,  whether  prophecy,  let  us  prophesy  according 
to  the  proportion  of  our  faith ;  or  ministry,  let  us  give  ourselves 
to  our  ministry ;  or  he  that  teacheth  to  his  teaching ;  or  he  that 
exhorteth  to  his  exhorting :  he  that  giveth  let  him  do  it  with 
liberality;  he  that  ruleth,  with  diligence;  he  that  showeth 
mercy,  with  cheerfulness  (Rom.  xii,  6-8). 

In  these  passages  the  Apostle  is  simply  pointing  out 
the  variety  of  spiritual  gifts  shared  by  the  faithful. 
The  list  is  not  exhaustive  nor  sharply  discriminative, 
as  if  the  exercise  of  one  function  barred  that  of  an- 
other. And  the  irregular  construction  which  com- 
bines the  names  of  impersonal  charismata  with  names 
designating  individuals  serves  to  show  that  it  is  the 
spiritual  gift  that  qualifies  these  latter  for  their  work- 
that  no  one  is  officially  appointed  to  rule  or  to  teach  any 
more  than  to  work  miracles  or  to  show  mercy.  We 
need  not  dwell  upon  the  charismata  of  beneficence:  the 
working  of  miracles,  the  healing  of  the  sick,  the  helping 


302  Catholicism 

of  the  needy,  the  consoling  of  the  afflicted  are  expressions 
of  the  simple  faith  and  ardent  brotherly  love  of  the  first 
Christians.  The  other  terms  in  the  passages  cited  refer 
to  persons  who  take  some  part  in  the  leadership  and  direc- 
tion of  the  community,  and  with  them  our  investigation 
is  concerned. 

In  after  days  the  title  of  Apostle  was  limited  to  the 
Twelve  with  the  later  addition  of  St.  Paul,  but  in  the 
primitive  Church  it  was  the  designation  of  all  missionaries 
and  preachers  of  the  Christ  who  gave  proof  of  their  divine 
commission  by  the  fruits  of  their  labors.  The  Apostle 
was  naturally  a  personage  of  influence  in  the  Church 
of  his  foundation,  and  to  him  it  looked  for  oversight 
and  guidance,  but  so  far  was  the  title  from  convey- 
ing any  suggestion  of  official  authority  that  it  continued 
in  frequent  use  in  its  general  sense  of  envoy  or  dele- 
gate. The  two  companions  of  Titus,  sent  with  him  to 
collect  the  subsidies  for  the  poor  of  Jerusalem,  St.  Paul 
calls  "apostles  of  the  churches,"  and  he  writes  to  the 
Philippian  church  of  the  arrival  of  Epaphroditus,  then- 
apostle.  x 

The  Prophet,  he  who  speaks  from  direct  inspiration  of 
God  and  makes  known  the  revelations  he  has  received,  is 
the  last  one  to  be  regarded  as  a  church  official.  Unlike 
the  incoherent  words  and  broken  phrases  of  the  speaker 
"in  a  tongue,"  unintelligible  to  his  hearers,  the  utter- 
ances of  the  Prophet  are  understood  of  all,  for  he  remains 
master  of  his  inspiration:  "the  spirits  of  the  prophets 
are  subject  to  the  Prophets. "  He  is  a  preacher  too ;  his  hot 
eloquence  stirs  men's  souls,  uplifts  the  devout  heart  in 
praise  of  the  divine  goodness  and  brings  sinners  to  their 
knees  in  penitence  before  God.  Though  the  passionate 
ardor  of  these  enthusiasts  might  sometimes  outrun  the 
limits  of  a  reasonable  sobriety,  their  influence  was  great 

1 II  Cor.  viii,  23;  Phil,  ii,  25. 


Catholicism  303 

in  quickening  and  sustaining  the  mighty  religious  impulse 
of  the  Christian  movement. 

The  Teachers  are  those  who  instruct  the  new  converts 
in  what  they  need  to  know  on  becoming  Christians.  They 
interpret  the  Scriptures,  explain  its  difficulties  and  show 
the  connection  of  the  old  dispensation  with  the  new  faith. 
As  the  Prophets  appeal  to  the  emotions,  the  Teachers 
address  the  intellect.  They  are  the  learned  element 
in  the  brotherhood,  the  apologists  of  Jesus  the  Messiah, 
and  with  them  the  earliest  theology  takes  rise.  It  was 
they  who  discovered  that  all  ancient  prophecy  referred 
to  Jesus  and  the  gospel  history.  Apollos  appears  to  have 
been  a  typical  Teacher,  and  we  are  told  that  he  was 
"mighty  in  the  Scriptures" — mighty,  that  is,  in  the 
approved  art  of  putting  into  Scripture  the  meaning  one 
desired  to  extract  from  it.1  These  offices  of  prophecy 
and  teaching  are  open  to  any  one  who  feels  that  he  has 
something  to  say  to  the  brethren,  and  it  is  for  the  assembly 
to  judge  whether  the  discourse  or  the  lesson  deserves 
attention. 

So  far  the  ministries  mentioned  by  the  Apostle  are  of  a 
general  character  and  belong,  we  may  say,  to  the  Church 
at  large.  Any  assembly  of  Christians  would  welcome 
the  visit  of  a  Prophet  or  Teacher,  and  many  of  them  went 
from  place  to  place,  their  frequent  journeyings  bringing 
closer  the  connection  between  the  scattered  churches 
and  quickening  their  sense  of  union  in  the  common  Chris- 
tian fellowship.  We  come  now  to  certain  functionaries 
whose  services  were  confined  to  the  local  communities 
of  which  they  were  members.  They  are  referred  to  in 
the  Corinthian  Letter  as  KufiepvifaeK;  and  in  that  to  the 
Romans  as  6  xpoiarfyevos,  terms  our  English  version 
renders  respectively  as  " governments "  and  "he  that 
ruleth."  Another  reference  to  these  personages  is  found 

1  Acts  xviii,  24-28. 


304  Catholicism 

in  an  earlier  Epistle:  "We  beseech  you,  brethren,  to 
know  them  that  labor  among  you  and  are  over  you  in 
the  Lord  (xpoiaTd^evouq)  and  admonish  you,  and  to 
esteem  them  very  highly  in  love  for  their  work's  sake" 
(I  Thess.  v,  12,  13).  Here  there  is  but  one  class  of  per- 
sons in  question.  The  Proistamenoi — literally,  those 
who  are  at  the  head — are  those  who  labor  for  the  good 
of  the  community  and  give  counsel  and  admonition  to 
the  brethren.  In  Romans  it  is  intimated  that  their 
distinctive  gift  or  qualification  is  zeal.  This  is  scanty 
information,  but  enough  to  make  it  evident  that  the 
men  who  were  most  active  and  devoted,  who  gave  their 
best  efforts  to  foster  the  growth  and  consolidation  of  the 
young  community  and  were  gifted  with  superior  intelli- 
gence and  capacity  to  make  such  efforts  effective,  natu- 
rally took  the  lead  in  the  direction  of  affairs.  It  would 
be  more  readily  accorded  them  if  they  were  the  oldest 
members  of  the  association,  those  whom  the  Apostle 
calls  the  "first  fruits."  Probably  too  their  relatively 
easy  circumstances  gave  them  a  free  disposal  of  their 
time,  such  as  workers  for  a  living  could  not  command, 
and  enabled  them  to  undertake  services  requiring  the 
expenditure  of  money.  These  then  are  the  leaders  of  the 
Church,  or  according  to  Romans  and  Corinthians  those 
who  "preside"  and  "direct."  It  is  equally  evident, 
however,  that  they  are  not  regularly  constituted  officials. 
If  that  were  the  case  they  would  have  one  definite  desig- 
nation, and  it  would  not  be  put  at  the  end  of  the  Apostle's 
list  of  charismata  among  those  of  minor  importance, 
where  we  find  the  Proistamenoi  and  the  Kuberneseis 
and  the  corresponding  Poimenes  of  a  deutero-Pauline 
Epistle.1  Moreover  St.  Paul  could  not  ask  the  Thessa- 

1  "He  gave  some  to  be  Apostles,  and  some  prophets,  and  some  evangel- 
ists, and  some  pastors  and  teachers."    Eph.  iv,  n.    The  term  Pastor 
is  one  of  many  designations  of  the  Christian  minister  which  did 


Catholicism  305 

lonians  to  "recognise"  their  Proistamenoi  if  there  were  an 
established  presidency,  for  then  there  could  be  no  room 
for  doubt  as  to  the  persons  who  rilled  the  office.  As  it  is, 
he  urges  them  not  to  be  ungrateful,  but  to  acknowledge 
those  as  their  true  leaders  who  deserve  to  be  such  by 
their  zeal  and  energy,  by  their  active  interest  in  the 
common  affairs  and  the  exertions  they  make  for  the  com- 
mon welfare.  And  so  the  authority  of  the  Proistamenoi 
comes  wholly  from  the  services  they  render.  If  that  of 
the  Apostle  was  merely  moral  and  personal,  undefined 
and  ill  assured,  a  member  of  the  community  would  cer- 
tainly be  allowed  no  more.  There  is  need  to  settle  the 
order  of  proceedings  in  the  general  assembly  and  to 
execute  the  measures  decided  upon,  to  ensure  the  proper 
conducting  of  the  religious  meetings,  to  organise  the 
missionary  work  and  take  care  of  the  new  converts,  to 
attend  to  the  various  material  interests  of  the  community, 
slight  though  they  may  be,  and  to  exercise  a  general 
supervision  to  protect  the  faithful  against  false  teaching 
and  evil  influences.  Who  will  charge  themselves  with 
all  these  duties  but  those  who  are  willing  to  take  trouble 
and  not  spare  themselves,  to  put  their  time,  their  energies, 
and  their  resources  at  the  disposal  of  the  brethren.  These 
volunteer  workers  are  naturally  "at  the  head"  of  the 
community,  but  they  are  its  servants  rather  than  its 
masters,  and  the  government  of  the  Church  is  that  of 
Christ  himself  inspiring  his  disciples. x 

not  find  place  in  the  three  orders  finally  established,  though  it  is  still  in 
use  in  some  Protestant  churches,  as  another  term,  Rector  (^you/^>/os),  remains 
in  the  English  Church. 

x"The  organising  principle  in  the  Apostolic  Churches  was  nothing 
less  than  the  sense  of  the  divine  in  the  midst  of  the  community.  It  was 
nothing  less  than  the  belief  in  the  divine  gift,  the  divine  call  of  some  men 
to  take  upon  themselves  the  responsibility  of  personal  leadership,  to  exert 
influence  for  the  ordering  of  the  affairs  of  the  fellowship  of  believers.  It 
was  nothing  less  than  the  belief  in  an  enduement  of  men  with  spiritual 
ao 


306  Catholicism 

In  the  exceptional  instance  to  which  a  passing  reference 
has  been  made  we  find  mention  of  two  orders  of  officials 
whose  titles  have  come  down  to  our  day.  St.  Paul's 
Letter  to  the  Philippians  is  addressed  "to  all  the  saints 
in  Christ  Jesus  which  are  at  Philippi,  with  the  bishops 
and  deacons."  In  the  passage  from  Romans  cited  above 
the  term  diakonia,  translated  "ministry,"  has  a  very 
general  sense  and  applies  to  any  kind  of  service  rendered 
to  the  brethren.  Such  was  its  accepted  significance. 
Deacon  and  diaconate  are  expressions  the  Apostle  fre- 
quently employs  to  designate  himself  and  his  work; 
Christ  he  calls  a  diakonos  of  the  circumcision  (Rom. 
xv,  8),  and  as  late  as  the  age  of  Eusebius  the  Bishop  is 
called  BidcKovoq  Xdfou,  a  servitor  of  the  word,  and  his  bishopric 
BiccKovfa  Ti7<;  eida/coxY)?.  It  would  seem,  however,  that  the 
Diakonoi  addressed  in  Philippians  and  conjoined  with  the 
Episkopoi,  personages  not  elsewhere  mentioned  in  St. 
Paul's  Epistles,  formed  like  these  latter  a  class  of  special- 
ised functionaries.  The  community  of  Philippi  was  the 
earliest  of  the  Apostle's  plantations  in  Europe  and  of 
longest  experience  in  the  Christian  life,  and  this  Letter, 
the  last  that  came  from  Paul's  hands,  is  later  in  date  by 
several  years  than  those  to  the  Corinthians  and  the 
Romans;  hence  we  may  expect  that  at  the  time  of  its 
writing  the  organisation  of  the  Philippian  Church  would 
be  more  advanced  than  such  as  appears  in  the  earlier 
Epistles.  It  would  aid  this  rapid  development  that 
the  little  Christian  association  was  not  harassed  by  the 

power  to  do  these  things,  which  was  exactly  parallel  to  the  gift  of  grace  by 
which  men  led  acceptably  the  services  of  worship;  and  indeed  this  practical 
service  was  never  separated  from  the  leadership  in  worship  or  from  the 
service  of  the  word.  An  organisation  for  the  government  of  the  Church, 
in  the  sense  in  which  we  ordinarily  understand  these  words,  organisation 
and  government,  would  be  (in  the  view  of  apostolic  times)  a  contradiction 
of  the  essence  of  Christianity  and  of  the  nature  of  the  Church  itself." 
Moore,  The  New  Testament  in  the  Christian  Church,  228-229. 


Catholicism  307 

i 
antagonism  of  the  Jews  nor  distracted  by  the  internal 

dissensions  which  elsewhere  were  provoked  by  the  opposi- 
tion of  the  Judaisers.1  Nowhere  else  did  the  Apostle 
meet  with  such  fidelity  and  constant  devotion  as  in  this 
peaceable  and  practical  community  which  was  the  first 
to  perceive  the  advantages  of  a  regular  division  of  labor. 
The  mention  of  bishops  and  deacons  at  Philippi  brings 
to  light  one  fact  of  the  first  importance  to  a  true  view  of 
early  Church  history,  and  that  is  that  from  the  beginning 
and  during  its  whole  course  there  were  notable  differences 
of  organisation  in  the  several  Christian  communities  ac- 
cording to  their  origin,  their  composition,  their  peculiar 
circumstances;  and  the  development  of  their  internal 
constitution  was  as  varied  and  diverse  as  the  local  con- 
ditions which  gave  it  direction.  Whatever  they  were, 
these  primitive  bishops  and  deacons,  unknown  to  the 
other  Pauline  churches,  assuredly  were  not  yet  the  cleri- 
cal officials  who  appear  under  the  same  names  after  a 
century  of  ecclesiastical  evolution.  The  title  Episkopos 
was  not  an  invention  of  the  Philippian  Christians.  It 
was  in  use  among  the  Greeks  in  old  Athens  of  the  classic 
period  and  in  the  municipalities  and  private  associations 
of  the  first  century,  and  denoted  an  official  charged  with 
an  administrative  control  of  the  finances  and  the  execu- 
tion of  the  decrees  and  regulations  of  the  city  or  society. 
When  we  find  the  community  of  Philippi  giving  to  certain 
of  its  members  this  title  of  Episkopoi,  one  unknown  to 
Jewish  or  Christian  terminology,  it  is  reasonable  to  infer 
that  it  was  because  their  functions  corresponded  with 
those  of  officers  bearing  the  same  or  an  equivalent  title 

'Acts  xvi,  12-24  (the  "We"  document).  There  is  no  synagogue  at 
Philippi,  but  only  an  open  "place  of  prayer"  by  the  river,  and  the  women 
who  meet  there  are  proselytes  of  pagan  origin.  There  is  no  mention  of 
violence  on  the  part  of  Jews,  as  in  other  cities;  it  is  the  Macedonians  who 
have  Paul  arrested  on  the  charge  of  introducing  Jewish  customs. 


3°8  Catholicism 

(Epimeletai)  in  the  numerous  religious  societies  of  the 
day.  And  though,  except  for  the  bare  mention  of  them 
in  the  superscription,  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians  is 
silent  concerning  these  Episkopoi,  this  inference  finds 
confirmation  in  the  occasion  of  its  writing.  Paul  wrote 
to  thank  the  Philippian  brethren  for  the  donation  sent  to 
him  at  Rome  by  the  hands  of  Epaphroditus.  The  as- 
sembly had  voted  a  certain  sum  in  aid  of  his  necessities, 
and  since  the  Apostle  addresses  the  Episkopoi  in  particular 
in  his  letter  of  acknowledgment,  it  would  appear  that  the 
execution  of  the  decision,  the  collection  and  dispatch  of 
the  money  voted,  was  their  charge.  The  Diakonoi  in- 
cluded in  the  address  were  probably  those  whose  "ser- 
vices" were  limited  to  practical  and  material  affairs, 
especially  the  distribution  of  alms,  in  subordination  to 
the  Episkopoi.1  The  association  of  these  two  classes  of 
officials  in  the  earliest  writing  that  mentions  their  existence 
points  to  the  origin  of  the  intimate  relations  that  sub- 
sisted between  the  episcopate  and  the  diaconate  in  the 
Catholic  Church. 

It  is  in  accordance  with  the  usage  of  the  Greek  associa- 
tions that  we  find  a  plurality  of  Episkopoi  in  the  Philippian 
Church,  but  there  is  no  ground  whatever  for  the  assump- 
tion which  has  been  so  confidently  maintained  that  these 
Bishops  are  simply  Presbyters  under  another  name.2 
In  no  one  of  the  genuine  Epistles  of  St.  Paul  is  there  any 
mention  of  the  Presbyters  who  later  on  made  their  appear- 

1  This  specific  application  of  the  general  term  diakonoi  seems  to  have 
followed  pagan  usage.     "Diakonoi  was  not  only  a  common  name  for  ser- 
vants, but  was  specially  applied  to  those  who  at  a  religious  festival  distri- 
buted the  meat  of  the  sacrifice  among  the  company."    Hatch,  Organisa- 
tion of  the  early  Christian  Churches,  50. 

2  "It  is  a  fact  now  generally  recognised  by  theologians  of  all  shades  of 
opinion  that  in  the  language  of  the  New  Testament  the  same  officer  in  the 
Church  is  called  indifferently  bishop  or  presbyter."   Lightfoot,  St.  Paul's 
Epistle  to  the  Philippians,  93. 


Catholicism  309 

i 

ance  in  all  the  Christian  churches,  and  in  the  communities 
to  which  these  Epistles  are  addressed  there  is  no  trace  of 
such  an  order  of  officials  as  we  have  met  with  in  the 
church  of  Jerusalem.  The  plural  Episcopate  of  Philippi 
was  a  puzzle  to  those  who  fancied  that  from  the  first  a 
church  could  have  but  one  bishop,  and  seemed  enough  to 
establish  the  inference  that  these  primitive  bishops  were 
identical  with  presbyters;  but  from  the  moment  that  a 
more  thorough  study  of  the  private  associations  of  the 
Greek  world  supplied  a  satisfying  explanation  of  the 
presence  of  these  officers  in  the  little  Macedonian  com- 
munity no  reason  for  such  identification  remained. x 

As  to  the  relations  of  these  Episkopoi  to  the  other 
dignitaries  of  the  community,  the  prophets  and  teachers, 
and  the  leaders  or  directors  who  are  elsewhere  called 

1  Acts  xx  gives  us  a  discourse  of  St.  Paul  to  the  Presbyters  of  Ephesus 
and  at  v.  28  we  read:  "Take  heed  to  yourselves  and  to  all  the  flock  in 
which  the  Holy  Ghost  hath  made  you  bishops,  to  feed  the  Church  of  God 
which  He  purchased  with  His  own  blood."  These  are  words  which  the 
author  of  Acts  puts  in  the  mouth  of  the  Apostle,  according  to  the  well- 
known  usage  of  antiquity,  and  they  really  reflect  his  own  conceptions  and 
the  conditions  of  his  own  time.  Paul  certainly  believed  that  the  Holy 
Spirit  was  constantly  active  in  the  Church,  but  it  was  in  the  bestowal  of 
spiritual  gifts,  not  in  the  conferring  of  official  dignities.  That  notion 
belongs  to  the  ecclesiastical  materialism  of  a  later  time  when  the  early 
founts  of  inspiration  were  coming  to  be  canonised.  So  too  when  we  find 
the  representatives  of  the  Ephesian  church 'who  are  called  Presbyters  in 
v.  17,  addressed  as  Bishops  in  v.  28,  this  confusion  of  titles  is  of  the  writer's 
time.  Furthermore,  from  the  name  of  Presbyters  given  to  these  Ephesian 
notables  we  cannot  infer  the  existence  at  the  time  of  this  interview  of  a 
regular  presbyteral  government  at  Ephesus,  such  as  appears  in  the  next 
age,  unless  we  are  prepared  to  reject  the  testimony  of  the  Pauline  Epistles. 
If  they  are  called  Presbyters  whom  Paul  summons  to  Miletus,  they  are 
not  the  constituted  officials  of  the  Pastorals.  They  are  men  who  have 
received  the  name  of  Elder  which  was  common  to  Greek  and  Jewish  usage, 
because  being  those  of  oldest  standing,  the  most  capable,  most  active  mem- 
bers of  the  community,  they  have  assumed  the  direction  of  affairs.  In  a 
word,  they  are  the  Proistamenoi  of  Corinthians  and  Thessalonians  under 
another  name,  the  natural  leaders  of  the  church  in  right  of  their  qualifica- 
tions for  leadership. 


310  Catholicism 

Proistamenoi,  we  are  without  information,  but  it  may  be 
inferred  from  the  analogy  of  the  Greek  societies  that  they 
were  entrusted  with  certain  definitely  restricted  ad- 
ministrative functions  and  held  a  position  of  confidence, 
honorable  but  subordinate.  This  embryo  of  the  Catholic 
Episcopate  was  still  quite  indeterminate  and  gave  no  sign 
of  what  its  future  development  was  to  be. 

Our  sources  of  information  do  not  furnish  us  with 
answers  to  all  the  questions  we  would  like  to  ask  concern- 
ing the  life  of  the  early  Christian  churches,  but  in  the 
general  view  we  obtain  of  them  one  fact  stands  out  dis- 
tinctly: there  is  no  type  of  ecclesiastical  government,  no 
definite  ecclesiastical  organisation,  instituted  by  the 
founders  of  the  churches  in  pagan  lands. x  In  these  little 
fraternal  associations,  all  taken  up  with  their  new  beliefs 
and  hopes  and  holding  loosely  to  this  world  which  was  to 
pass  away,  religious  inspiration,  the  power  of  the  Spirit 
of  Christ  in  the  souls  of  the  faithful,  was  felt  to  be  the  only 
true  source  of  authority.  The  commission  of  the  prophet 
or  teacher  was  the  recognition  of  the  community  that  the 
one  who  spoke  to  them  was  called  of  God  and  endowed 
for  his  ministry  with  power  from  on  high.  So  with  every 
other  functionary:  any  man  moved  by  the  Spirit  might 
take  upon  himself  any  service  in  the  church,  and  his 
efficiency  was  the  sign  of  a  divine  appointment.  In  a 
word,  the  idea  of  authority,  of  government,  was  unknown 
to  an  organisation — if  we  may  use  that  term — purely 

'"There  were  no  regulations,  no  leader  with  peculiar  prerogatives; 
there  were  only  voluntary  services  which  established  a  moral  claim  to 
grateful  recognition.  The  self-government  of  the  congregation  is  so  pal- 
pable that  it  excludes  any  government  by  officials,  especially  any  office  of  a 
guiding  teacher,  for  there  was  no  other  teaching  than  that  which  depended 
on  individual  talent  and  the  free  impulse  of  the  believers.  Paul  always 
writes  to  the  entire  congregation;  no  governing  office  is  required  to  achieve 
its  unification;  the  binding  tie  is  the  meeting  for  general  edification  and  for 
the  Lord's  Supper."  Pfleiderer,  Christian  Origins,  203-204. 

To  the  same  effect  see  Weizsacker,  The  Apostolic  Age,  ii,  310-311. 


Catholicism  311 

i 

charismatic.  The  Christian's  sense  of  personal  freedom 
was  voiced  in  the  words  attributed  to  Jesus:  "One  is 
your  Master,  even  Christ,  and  all  ye  are  brethren." 
Here  then  is  a  striking  characteristic  of  primitive  Chris- 
tianity, the  entire  absence  of  a  clerical  order  in  the  Church. 
The  all-common  priesthood  of  the  faithful,  which  was  a 
fundamental  idea  of  Christianity,  was  in  effect  the  non- 
existence  of  any  priesthood  whatever.  All  the  acts 
subsequently  reserved  to  the  clergy,  such  as  preaching, 
administration  of  the  sacraments,  the  declaration  of  the 
forgiveness  of  sin,  while  preferentially  performed  by  the 
leaders  of  the  church,  were  by  no  means  their  exclusive 
prerogative.  When  later  on  the  word  clergy  appears 
it  merely  denotes  at  first  a  position  in  the  community 
which  was  open  to  all ;  it  does  not  imply  rank  or  authority 
or  class  separation.1  And  so  there  were  no  special  cele- 
brants of  worship,  for  worship  in  the  spirit  was  of  an  ele- 
mentary simplicity  and  all  the  brethren  might  take  active 
part  in  it.  He  who  would,  gave  voice  to  the  word  of 
prayer  or  praise,  of  exhortation  or  admonition ;  and  if,  as 
at  Corinth,  enthusiasm  gave  rise  to  disorder,  the  Apostle's 
remedy  is  not  regulation  by  a  presiding  official,  but  the 
self-control  and  consideration  for  others  which  he  urges 
upon  those  filled  with  the  Spirit.  So  with  the  common 
meal  where  the  death  of  Christ  was  commemorated 
according  to  the  instructions  of  the  Apostle.  It  was 
meant  to  foster  the  sense  of  brotherhood  in  the  Lord 
among  those  who  gathered  at  its  table,  but  when  greed 
and  selfishness  ignored  the  poorer  brother,  St.  Paul 
would  not  resort  to  measures  of  repressive  discipline,  but 

1  In  Acts  (xv,  4)  the  "laity"  of  after  days  are  spoken  of  as  constituting 
the  Church:  "they  were  received  of  the  church  and  of  the  apostles  and 
elders."  And  even  in  his  day  Tertullian  ventured  to  declare:  "Where 
three  are  gathered  together  in  Christ's  name  there  is  a  church,  although 
they  be  laymen." 
ao 


3*2  Catholicism 

sought  to  fix  men's  thought  on  Christ  and  waken  a  feeling 
for  the  solemnity  of  the  Supper  in  those  who  lacked  the 
kindly  Christian  sentiment.  Always  he  acted  on  this 
principle.  In  the  matter  of  meats  that  came  from  a 
heathen  sacrifice  he  would  not  lay  down  a  law ;  he  pointed 
out  that  it  was  a  question  of  conscience,  of  a  man's  own 
and  also  of  his  brother's,  which  latter  must  be  considered, 
for  love  was  the  supreme  law  of  Christian  conduct.  He 
would  not  impose  a  morality  from  outside,  but  tried  to 
educate  his  free  communities  to  form  their  own  moral 
standards  under  the  guidance  of  the  Spirit. 

The  meetings  for  worship  were  open  to  all  comers,  since 
they  were  in  some  sort  a  missionary  agency,  and  though 
the  eucharistic  Agape  was  a  fraternity  feast  for  members 
only,  it  was  not  yet  a  Mystery  for  the  initiate,  and  the 
baptism  that  gave  admission  to  the  community  was  offered 
unconditionally  to  all  who  would  receive  it.1  For  the 
Apostolic  Churches  were  free  from  the  temper  of  exclu- 
siveness  which  is  the  mark  of  a  religious  sect.  The  Chris- 
tians were  not  zealots  for  a  creed  or  a  cultus ;  their  energies 
were  centred  on  the  moral  regeneration  that  should  bring 
the  salvation  of  mankind.  What  concerned  them  were 
the  things  of  the  spirit,  their  own  salvation  and  that  of 
their  brethren  of  yesterday,  Jews  or  Pagans.  This  work 
of  salvation  not  only  enlists  the  Apostles,  Prophets, 
Teachers  who  go  from  place  to  place  wherever  the  Spirit 
calls  them,  but  in  each  community  the  most  ardent  and 
devoted  give  themselves  to  the  spiritual  interests  of  the 
brotherhood  and  of  its  members  individually;  upholding 
the  faltering,  reclaiming  the  backslider,  lending  to  all 
who  need  it  the  encouragement  and  moral  support  which 
the  strong  hold  at  the  service  of  the  weak.  This  cure 

1  E.g.,  Acts  viii,  36-38.  Even  in  the  interpolation  (v.  37),  made  to 
suit  the  requirements  of  a  later  day,  the  only  condition  is  the  Ethiopian's 
confession  of  belief  in  Christ  with  all  his  heart. 


Catholicism  f         313 

of  souls  is  the  highest  office  of  the  Proistamenoi  or  Pres- 
buteroi,  for  a  society  entirely  devoted  to  spiritual  objects 
needs  above  all  spiritual  leaders.  Early  Christianity  was 
a  way  of  life.  The  bond  of  association  was  a  common 
ideal  and  a  common  effort  toward  its  realisation  which 
had  to  be  strenuously  maintained.  The  Christian  com- 
munities were  unsheltered  by  a  monastic  retirement; 
they  lived  in  the  world,  in  daily  contact  with  a  decadent 
and  corrupt  society  from  which  they  had  been  rescued 
by  the  grace  of  God.  Moral  purity  was  not  merely 
the  requirement  of  their  Christian  calling,  but  the  very 
condition  of  their  existence.  If  the  salt  should  lose  its 
savor,  if  the  strictness  of  self -discipline  should  be  relaxed, 
they  would  collapse,  fall  back  into  the  evil  world  and  share 
its  doom.  For  the  most  part,  it  may  be  said,  the  high 
standard  of  Christian  morality  was  maintained  without 
great  difficulty.  For  the  most  part  the  Christians  were 
fully  conscious  of  their  high  calling,  and  earnest  in  their 
endeavor  to  develop  the  new  life  in  Christ.  For  many, 
conversion  had  been  a  genuine  metanoia,  a  decisive  break 
with  an  evil  past,  a  deep  inner  transformation,  and  now 
their  energies  were  bent  on  perfecting  that  which  had  been 
begun  in  them  by  the  Spirit  of  holiness.  Self-control, 
integrity  and  kindliness,  eagerness  to  serve  and  joy  in 
sacrifice,  readiness  to  forgive  and  patiently  endure — such 
were  the  qualities  they  sought  to  win,  for  upon  each  rested 
his  own  responsibility  for  the  shining  example  the  followers 
of  Christ  must  show  to  "them  that  were  without."  This 
Christian  life,  the  fact  that  religion  was  a  life,  is  the 
strength  and  beauty  of  the  early  days  of  faith.1  In  this 

x"It  was  not  to  a  higher  moral  teaching  that  Christianity  owed  its 
victory.  Stoicism  and  Neo-platonism  produced  moral  thoughts  of  great 
beauty  and  purity,  more  imposing  to  superficial  contemplation  than  the 
simple  Christian  precepts.  Yet  neither  of  them  could  enable  artisans  and 
old  women  to  lead  a  truly  philosophical  life;  Christianity  could  and  did; 
the  apologists  point  triumphantly  to  the  realisation  of  the  moral  ideal 


314  Catholicism 

were  the  germs  of  social  regeneration.  Externally  the 
Christian  churches  might  appear,  as  later  they  appeared 
to  Pliny,  much  like  other  religious  associations  of  the 
time,  but  it  was  not  in  externalities  that  their  essential 
character  was  to  be  found.  They  were  the  product  of  a 
spiritual  impulse:  as  Wernle  says,  the  Christian  Church 
was  the  child  of  enthusiasm ;  it  arose  in  a  hero-worship  the 
truest  and  purest  that  has  ever  been.  Jesus  himself 
and  none  other  was  the  centre  of  the  new  community, 
present  in  the  veneration,  the  love,  the  faith  of  his  disci- 
ples. This  was  the  creative  force,  a  sense  of  the  divine  in 
their  midst,  the  sense  of  a  common  inspiration  from  the 
life-giving  spirit  of  the  unseen  Lord  thrilling  all  hearts 
with  a  fervor  of  devotion.  Doubtless  this  early  Christian 
life  was  not  exempt  from  human  imperfection,  yet  the 
religious  history  of  mankind  has  nothing  to  show  more 
simple  and  more  beautiful.  Whatever  we  may  think  of 
the  claim  of  the  later  Church  to  be  the  Kingdom  of  God, 
the  Church  of  the  first  days  was  not  far  from  realising  the 
Kingdom  that  lay  in  the  mind  of  Jesus,  and  that  which  Paul 
defined  as  "righteousness  and  peace  and  joy  in  the  Holy 
Ghost. ' '  Unhappily  the  little  communities  that  sprang  up 
like  flowers  in  the  unclean  cities  of  the  pagan  world  were 
in  the  retention  of  their  first  freshness  as  short  lived  as 
flowers  are.  The  environment  was  unfavorable,  and  in  its 
adaptation  to  the  environment, 'necessitated  by  the  struggle 
for  existence,  the  Catholic  Church  took  rise,  and  with  it 
came  the  transformation  of  primitive  Christianity. 

b.  The  Church  of  the  "Pastorals." 

In  a  document  dating  from  the  last  years  of  the  first 
century  we  catch  a  glimpse  of  early  Christianity  as  it 

among  Christians  of  every  standing.  That  was  due  to  the  power  which 
issued  from  Jesus  Christ  and  actually  transformed  men."  Dobschutz, 
Christian  Life  in  the  Primitive  Church,  379. 


Catholicism  315 

appears  in  the  country  churches  of  Galilee  and  Syria, 
free  from  the  legal  servitude  of  Christian  Judaism  and  un- 
affected by  the  metaphysical  speculations  that  distracted 
the  churches  of  Hellenic  Asia.  It  was  in  these  quiet 
regions,  the  scene  of  the  Master's  ministry  and  of  the 
missionary  labors  of  his  liberal  disciples,  the  followers  of 
Stephen,  that  the  Galilean  Gospel,  the  real  Gospel  of 
Jesus,  was  preserved  by  the  simple  souls  who  treasured  the 
memory  of  his  living  word;  and  here  were  gathered  those 
little  detached  collections  of  his  sayings  and  doings  from 
which  our  synoptic  gospels  are  derived.  The  Teaching  of 
The  Twelve  Apostles  (AiSa/iij  Kupfou  8i<fc  TWV  BwSeKa  aiuoardXwv) 
is  a  manual  of  instructions  relative  to  the  religious  life 
of  the  Christian  community,  and  it  brings  to  view  the 
simple  popular  conception  of  the  Christian  faith.  It  is 
one  purely  moral:  to  live  as  Jesus  taught  while  awaiting 
his  return,  that  is  the  whole  concern  of  the  Christian. 
The  Didache  has  no  theology,  no  theories  concerning  the 
glorified  Christ;  even  in  the  instructions  relating  to  the 
eucharist  there  is  no  question  of  his  redemptive  death. 
With  a  teaching  purely  practical  and  a  sacramental  ritual 
of  the  simplest,  only  the  mere  rudiments  of  church  or- 
ganisation appear  in  these  Syro-Palestinian  communities. 
They  look  for  edification  and  inspiration  to  the  itinerant 
apostles  and  prophets  who  bring  to  them  the  word  of 
the  Lord.  Though  generally  deserving  of  the  high  regard 
accorded  them,  yet  the  Didache  warns  the  brethren  that 
these  visitors  are  to  be  received  with  caution.  There  are 
some  who  would  impart  ideas  of  their  own  under  cover 
of  the  Lord's  authority,  and  some  who  would  turn  their 
mission  to  their  own  profit.  The  tree  is  to  be  known  by 
its  fruits:  "Not  everyone  that  speaketh  in  the  spirit  is  a 
prophet,  but  only  if  he  have  the  ways  of  the  Lord.  If  one 
teach  so  as  to  promote  righteousness  and  knowledge  of 
the  Lord,  receive  him;  but  if  he  teach  another  teaching, 


316  Catholicism 

do  not  hear  him."  And  again:  "If  the  apostle  stop 
with  you,  let  him  remain  a  day,  and  another  if  need  be, 
but  if  he  remain  three  days  he  is  a  false  prophet.  Or  if 
when  he  departs  he  ask  for  money  he  is  a  false  prophet." 
These  recommendations  addressed  to  the  community  at 
large  show  that  it  retains  the  independent  sovereignty 
of  the  early  days. 

From  the  relations  of  the  church  to  its  spiritual  leaders 
the  Didache  turns  to  its  internal  affairs,  and  among 
other  directions  we  read  that  on  the  Lord's  day  the 
brethren  are  to  assemble  to  break  bread  and  give  thanks 
after  confessing  their  sins,  and  if  anyone  has  a  quarrel 
with  his  neighbor  he  is  not  to  take  part  in  the  Supper 
until  they  be  reconciled,  so  that  the  offering  shall  be 
pure.  And  then  the  manual  proceeds:  "Elect  therefore 
bishops  and  deacons  worthy  of  their  office,  men  of  good 
will,  tried  and  approved,  not  covetous  of  money;  for  they 
too  render  the  services  of  prophet  and  teacher."  We 
learn  from  this  passage  in  the  first  place  that  the  bishops 
and  deacons  are  elected  by  the  community;  it  is  not  the 
apostles  or  prophets  who  appoint  these  church  officers. 
It  is  plain  also  from  the  connection  that  besides  their 
control  of  the  receipt  and  distribution  of  the  offerings  it  is 
the  part  of  the  bishops  to  take  care  that  the  eucharistic 
service  be  conducted  with  propriety,  that  the  confession 
of  sin  be  not  neglected  and  that  any  disputes  between 
brethren  shall  be  settled  by  their  arbitration  before  the 
disputants  can  be  admitted  to  the  Supper.  So  far  the 
duties  of  bishops  and  deacons  are  confined  to  matters  of 
administration  and  discipline,  but  when  it  is  added  that 
they  also  serve  as  prophets  and  teachers  we  see  that  the 
charismatic  constitution  of  the  churches  is  one  that  cannot 
persist  and  that  the  first  step  is  taken  in  the  progressive 
absorption  by  church  officials  of  the  spiritual  functions 
of  the  primitive  free  religious  life.  One  cause  of  this 


Catholicism  317 

vitally  important  change,  as  the  Didache  intimates,  is  the 
fact  that  the  prophets  are  becoming  fewer.  As  it  settles 
into  a  certain  traditional  type  or  norm  the  early  prophetic 
inspiration  is  on  the  wane;  yet  the  edification  of  the 
Church  cannot  be  discontinued  and  it  naturally  falls  to  the 
officers  to  carry  on  this  work.  Moreover  their  duties  of 
supervision  make  it  especially  incumbent  on  them  to 
prevent  the  spread  of  erroneous  teaching  by  false  prophets, 
or  the  introduction  of  practices  foreign  to  the  Christian 
tradition.  Their  only  means  to  this  end  are  warnings 
and  exhortations  addressed  to  the  assembly,  or  to  in- 
dividuals likely  to  be  misled,  and  so  far  as  they  are  heeded 
they  tend  to  become  directors  of  religious  teaching  and 
as  such  in  effect  teachers  themselves.  On  the  whole  how- 
ever it  is  the  view  of  the  Didache  that  the  apostles  and 
prophets,  who  travel  from  place  to  place  awakening  the 
fervor  of  the  Christian  inspiration,  are  the  true  organs  of 
the  one  Christian  Society,  and  while  it  is  necessary  to  take 
precautions  against  the  unworthy  who  abuse  their  mis- 
sion, no  one  dreams  of  subordinating  them  to  the  local 
church  authorities,  though  these  guardians  of  the  evangelic 
tradition  may  on  occasion  assume  their  functions. 

The  Pastoral  Epistles  of  a  little  later  date  transport  us 
to  a  very  different  scene  from  that  pictured  by  the 
Didache.  In  the  Syro-Palestinian  churches  collections  of 
Sayings  of  the  Lord  serve  as  a  criterion  of  authenticity  to 
apply  to  the  various  teachings  attributed  to  Jesus  by  the 
itinerant  preachers;  in  the  churches  of  Asia  Minor  the 
endeavor  is  to  protect  the  Christian  doctrine — that 
is,  the  Pauline  theology — against  rival  speculations  by 
establishing  it  as  an  authoritative  apostolic  tradition, 
supreme  over  all  deliverances  of  irresponsible  teachers. 
For  the  situation  was  critical.  In  the  cosmopolitan  cities 
of  Ephesus,  Smyrna,  and  others  of  that  region,  where 
along  with  their  merchandise  the  ideas  of  East  and  West 


318  Catholicism 

were  exchanged,  apocalyptics,  sophists,  gnostics,  mystics, 
ascetics,  antinomians,  and  the  votaries  of  many  foreign 
cults  crowded  upon  one  another  contending  for  audience. 
The  churches  were  profoundly  agitated  by  the  invasion 
of  a  host  of  voluble  visionaries,  men's  minds  were  seething 
with  a  ferment  of  strange  doctrines,  and  the  Christianity 
of  Paul  was  in  danger  of  being  overwhelmed  by  the 
rising  flood  of  intellectual  anarchy.  To  the  earnest 
disciples  of  the  great  Apostle  it  seemed  that  a  stronger 
government  and  a  stricter  discipline  were  needed  to  cope 
with  these  threatening  conditions,  and  with  this  end  in 
view  the  Pastorals  were  given  out,  purporting  to  be  Letters 
addressed  by  St.  Paul  to  two  of  his  intimate  associates 
to  whom  he  delegates  his  authority  over  the  churches. 
The  Apostle  charges  them  with  the  safe-guarding  of  the 
Pauline  gospel  : 

I  know  him  whom  I  have  believed  and  I  am  persuaded 
that  he  is  able  to  guard  the  deposit  which  he  hath  committed 
unto  me  against  that  day.  Hold  in  faith  and  love  of  Christ 
Jesus  the  type  of  sound  words  which  thou  hast  heard  from 
me.  That  precious  (/caX-qv)  deposit  which  was  committed 
unto  thee  guard  through  the  Holy  Spirit  which  dwelleth  in  us.  x 

This  is  the  central  thought  of  the  Pastorals:  Paul  re- 
ceived from  Christ  the  deposit  of  the  gospel;  before  his 
death  he  conveyed  it  to  these  faithful  disciples  and  they 
in  turn  are  to  hand  it  on  to  the  directors  of  the  churches 
appointed  or  instructed  by  them.  The  mission  of  Timo- 
thy and  Titus  is  to  promulgate  this  authentic  gospel  of 
salvation  and  to  bar  out  from  the  churches  all  teaching 
of  a  different  tendency  (eTspoBiBac/caXfo).  To  this  end 


1  II  Tim.  i,  12-14.  The  First  Epistle  ends  with  the  same  exhortation: 
"O  Timothy,  guard  the  deposit  entrusted  to  thee,  turning  away  from  the 
profane  babblings  and  oppositions  of  the  knowledge  (gnosis)  which  is 
falsely  so  called." 


Catholicism  319 

they  are  to  take  care  that  the  rulers  of  the  churches,  upon 
whom  after  them  the  guardianship  of  the  deposit  will 
depend,  shall  be  safe  men  and  such  as  will  not  depart 
from  the  straight  path.  Our  author  trusts  that  by  his 
device  of  a  regular  transmission,  officially  guaranteed, 
the  Pauline  tradition  can  be  maintained  against  the 
assaults  of  individualistic  speculation.  This  is  the  sub- 
stitution of  an  external  religious  authority  for  the  in- 
ternal authority  which  St.  Paul  had  appealed  to,  and 
which  the  Reformers  called  the  "witness  of  the  Spirit"; 
it  is  the  negation  of  the  principle  which  inspired  those 
whose  faith  it  undertakes  to  guard.  Paul  freed  Chris- 
tianity from  Judaism  and  created  a  new  religious  system 
by  assertion  of  the  sovereign  authority  of  individual 
consciousness  enlightened  by  the  Spirit  of  Christ;  now 
to  preserve  this  system,  to  maintain  the  prevalence  of 
Pauline  doctrine,  his  disciples  sacrifice  this  originative 
principle  and  declare  that  the  doctrine  is  certified  by  the 
authority  of  tradition.  The  Gospel  of  Jesus  is  its  own 
evidence,  its  truth  is  intuitively  discerned;  the  Pauline 
gospel  in  the  hands  of  ecclesiastics  is  to  be  accepted 
because  it  bears  the  official  stamp  of  orthodoxy.  These 
men  took  the  easiest  way.  The  churches  were  beset  by  a 
clamor  of  conflicting  doctrines  all  claiming  their  adherence ; 
our  author  brings  relief  to  the  bewildered  Christians  by 
his  theory  of  tradition.  The  question  is  not  what  is  the 
intrinsic  truth  of  a  doctrine,  but  where  does  it  come  from, 
can  it  show  a  regular  chain  of  descent  from  an  unquestion- 
able authority.  Hence  the  r61e  of  the  apostolic  delegates, 
of  whom  elsewhere  no  trace  is  to  be  found.  The  teaching 
of  bishops  and  presbyters  they  have  received  from  Timo- 
thy, Timothy  from  Paul,  and  Paul  from  Christ.  That 
is  satisfactory  and  easy  to  understand.  It  is  the  first 
form  of  the  Catholic  theory.  The  author  of  the  Pastorals 
is  not  aware  of  the  institution  of  bishops  by  the  Apostle 


320  Catholicism 

and  therefore  does  not  represent  the  transmission  of 
Christian  truth  as  through  an  episcopal  succession.  He 
appears  to  know  that  the  Apostle  Paul  made  it  no  part 
of  his  business  to  ordain  bishops  and  elders,  and  conse- 
quently it  is  not  possible  to  name  these  as  immediate 
depositaries  of  the  apostolic  doctrine.  And  this  is  why 
the  apostolic  delegates  are  introduced  who  transmit  to  the 
church  officials  the  deposit  they  have  received  from  St. 
Paul.  Later  on,  when  the  theory  of  apostolic  succession 
has  been  evolved,  these  intermediaries  become  superfluous 
and  Timothy  and  Titus  are  made  to  be  bishops  of  Ephesus 
and  Crete  of  the  then  established  monarchical  type.  In 
point  of  fact  these  personages  such  as  they  are  described 
in  the  Pastorals  never  existed.  The  mission  of  the 
apostolic  delegates  is  a  fiction  invented  to  give  support 
to  the  ecclesiastical  regulations  which  the  author  is 
anxious  to  establish.  It  is  plain  that  the  author  of  Acts 
in  the  discourse  which  he  makes  Paul  address  to  the 
elders  of  Ephesus  knows  nothing  of  the  position  which 
according  to  the  Pastorals  Timothy  holds  in  that  church. 
At  the  same  time,  it  is  quite  possible  that  co-workers  with 
the  Apostle,  such  as  Timothy  and  Titus,  may  have  been 
led  to  offer  counsel  to  the  communities  they  visited  in  the 
course  of  their  journey  ings,  and  that  on  this  slight  historic 
basis  these  pseudepigraphic  Epistles  are  built.  Just 
as  the  author  of  Acts,  learning  from  the  journal  of  Paul's 
companion  that  the  Apostle  summoned  the  Ephesian 
presbyters  to  meet  him  at  Miletus,  composed  a  discourse 
such  as  according  to  him  should  have  been  delivered  on 
this  occasion,  so  the  author  of  the  Pastorals  makes  Paul 
write  to  his  trusted  deputies  the  instructions  which  to  his 
own  mind  are  most  suitable  for  the  defense  of  the  Pauline 
doctrine  and  the  maintenance  of  order  in  the  churches.1 

1  These  Letters  purporting  to  be  from  the  hand  of  Paul  we  should  call 
forgeries,  but  we  must  beware  of  judging  the  literary  morals  of  antiquity 


Catholicism  321 

How  much  in  the  ecclesiastical  organisation  pictured  in 
the  Pastorals  represents  historical  facts,  and  how  much 
that  appears  to  be  already  established  is  only  what  cer- 
tain leaders  were  seeking  to  introduce,  it  is  difficult  to 
say,  for  the  Church  institutions  at  this  time  were  in 
process  of  formation.  These  Letters  belong  to  a  period 
of  transition  from  the  pure  democracy  of  the  early  com- 
munities to  the  episcopal  monarchy  which  will  soon  arise. 
The  Presbyters  of  the  Asiatic  churches  appear  to  be  the 
direct  successors  of  the  Proistamenoi  of  the  Pauline 
Epistles ;  they  are  the  men  of  eminent  piety  and  zeal  who 
in  associations  devoted  to  the  moral  and  religious  life 
naturally  come  to  the  front  and  are  looked  upon  as  shep- 
herds of  the  flock.  To  them  falls  the  presidency  of  meet- 
ings for  deliberation  on  spiritual  interests,  and  all  other 
duties  pertaining  to  the  cure  of  souls,  as  it  affects  the 
collective  community  or  its  members  taken  individually. 
But  now  this  unorganised  group  of  primitive  Presbyters 
forms  a  Presbyterion ;  the  volunteer  leaders  of  the  earlier 
time  have  become  a  governing  council  and  their  moral 
influence  official  authority.  This  change  however  has 
taken  place  with  the  sanction  of  the  community,  which 


by  the  standards  of  our  own  day.  During  the  first  centuries  of  our  era, 
and  those  immediately  preceding,  it  was  the  common  practice  for  an  author 
relatively  obscure  to  publish  his  writings  in  the  name  of  some  venerated 
personage  of  the  past  in  order  to  secure  the  wider  hearing  and  readier 
acceptance  which  such  distinguished  patronage  would  give  them.  It  was  a 
literary  mode  or  fashion  in  which  neither  the  writer  nor  his  readers,  if  by 
chance  they  discovered  his  identity,  saw  anything  reprehensible.  Von 
Soden  (History  of  the  Early  Christian  Literature,  317-319)  conjectures  that 
in  Titus  and  II  Timothy  the  writer  may  have  made  use  of  genuine  letters 
from  the  Apostle  to  his  fellow-workers  containing  personal  details  which 
lend  verisimilitude  to  the  alleged  authorship :  a  brief  note  or  tablet,  Titus 
i,  laand  4,  and  iii,  12-15;  and  a  longer  letter,  II  Tim.  i,  1-4,  15-18  and  iv, 
6-22.  On  the  other  hand,  Julicher,  criticising  these  passages,  concludes 
that  they  too  are  inventions  like  the  rest.  Introduction  to  the  New  Testa- 
ment, 190-192  and  199. 
•i 


322  Catholicism 

in  its  ultimate  supreme  authority  retains  control  of  its 
presbyters.  In  this  presbyteral  council,  as  in  all  such 
bodies,  there  are  some  who  take  upon  them  the  larger 
share  of  the  work  and  others  who  are  content  to  have 
them  do  so,  and  thus  we  read :  ' '  Let  the  elders  that  rule 
well  be  counted  worthy  of  double  honor,  especially  those 
who  labor  in  the  word  and  in  teaching.  For  the  Scripture 
saith,  'Thou  shalt  not  muzzle  the  ox  when  he  treadeth 
out  the  corn,'  and  'The  laborer  is  worthy  of  his  hire.'"1 
We  may  learn  several  things  from  this  brief  passage.  It 
appears  from  the  citations  that  the  "honor"  due  to  the 
elders  signifies  a  material  as  well  as  a  moral  reward.  They 
who  devote  their  time  to  the  service  of  the  community 
ought  to  receive  an  honorarium.  There  is  no  question 
here  of  a  regular  salary;  the  elders  receive  a  share  of  the 
offerings  brought  to  the  Agape,  and  to  the  more  diligent 
should  be  assigned  a  larger  share.  This  is  an  admission 
that  the  presbyters  were  in  some  measure  responsible 
to  the  general  assembly,  since  which  ones  were  especially 
efficient  and  deserving  it  must  have  been  left  to  the 
assembly  to  decide,  and  from  this  it  may  be  inferred  that  it 
had  some  voice  in  their  election.  According  to  the  Pas- 
torals, presbyters  are  appointed  by  the  apostolic  delegates, 
but  the  fact  appears  to  be  that  they  were  nominated  by 
the  council  and  the  choice  submitted  to  the  assembly  for  its 
ratification.  There  are  some  of  the  presbyters,  we  are  told, 
who  take  up  the  highly  meritorious  work  of  preaching  and 
teaching.  This  then  was  no  part  of  their  original  functions, 
but  an  assumption  of  the  one  belonging  to  the  itinerant 
missionaries,  of  whom  there  is  no  mention  in  the  Pastorals. 
To  substitute  the  teaching  of  authorised  officials  for  the 
dangerously  free  utterances  of  individual  inspiration 

1 1  Tim.  v,  17-18.  The  Scriptures  referred  to  are  Deuteronomy  and 
the  gospel  of  Luke.  It  is  noteworthy  that  this  late  gospel  is  already  quoted 
as  "Scripture." 


Catholicism  323 

was  an  innovation  which  naturally  found  favor  in  writings 
so  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  ecclesiasticism.  The  increas- 
ing power  of  the  Presbyterate  and  the  grave  importance 
of  the  duties  assigned  to  it  make  it  imperative  that  great 
care  be  exercised  in  the  selection  of  its  members,  and 
Timothy  is  warned  to  "lay  hands  hastily  on  no  man." 
In  I  Tim.  iii,  1-7  and  Titus  i,  5-9  we  have  a  detailed 
enumeration  of  the  qualifications  required  of  elders  and 
bishops,  among  which  we  note  that  they  must  be  married 
men,  and  such  as  order  their  household  wisely  and  well, 
for  in  this  they  give  promise  of  an  efficient  management 
of  church  affairs.  This  must  have  seemed  a  strange 
requirement  in  the  days  of  the  celibate  clergy. 

In  the  passages  referred  to  and  in  Acts  xx— 28  the  terms 
elder  and  bishop  are  apparently  used  indiscriminately,  as 
if  there  were  no  distinction  between  them,  and  that  in 
fact  there  was  none  is  the  Catholic  tradition  from  the 
time  of  Jerome.1  We  may  ask  with  Juliet,  What's  in  a 
name  ?  but  after  all  a  name  has  some  significance,  and  why 
two  names  if  there  is  but  one  office?  Episkopoi,  it  may 
be  repeated,  was  the  name  of  the  financial  officers  of  the 
private  associations,  religious  or  secular,  so  numerous  at 
this  time  throughout  the  Empire,  and  there  cannot  be  a 
reasonable  doubt  that  in  the  Christian  communities  the 
same  name  denoted  a  similar  officer.  Hence  it  is  in  con- 
nection with  a  financial  transaction  that  we  first  find 
mention  of  Episkopoi  in  a  Christian  church,  and  hence 
in  the  Pastorals,  as  in  the  Didache,  it  is  a  chief  requirement 
of  Episkopoi  that  they  be  men  not  covetous  of  money. 
Scanty  as  were  the  resources  of  these  little  associations 

1  Jerome  maintained  that  the  churches  were  originally  governed  by  a 
body  of  presbyters,  but  in  course  of  time  one  was  elected  to  preside  over 
the  rest.  This  theory  that  the  first  bishops  were  presiding  elders  gave  sup- 
port to  Jerome's  opposition  to  a  relative  depreciation  of  the  Presbyterate 
which  was  a  tendency  of  his  time;  it  was  not  supported  by  any  special 
knowledge  on  his  part  of  conditions  subsisting  in  the  sub-apostolic  age. 


324  Catholicism 

there  were  receipts  and  expenditures  of  which  account 
must  be  kept,  and  the  management  of  the  common 
funds  was  the  responsibility  of  the  Episkopos  as  the 
"steward  of  God"  (OeoO  oUovoVoq,  Titus  i,  7).  Above  all 
the  Episkopos  was  chief  almoner  and  it  was  as  such  that 
his  office  acquired  increasing  importance,  a  result  due  to 
the  spirit  of  Christianity  and  to  the  prevalent  economic 
depression.  At  this  time  poverty  was  widespread  and 
its  heavy  pressure  roused  all  classes  to  active  measures 
of  relief.  Nowhere  did  the  impulse  of  benevolence  find 
such  enthusiastic  expression  as  in  the  Christian  communi- 
ties, for  while  others  might  be  charitable,  charity  was  of 
the  essence  of  their  life,  and  many  of  the  early  writings 
exalt  almsgiving  above  prayer  and  fasting  to  the  chief 
place  in  Christian  duty.  To  the  poor  the  Gospel  was 
preached  from  the  first,  and  the  poor  flocked  into  the 
churches.  Moreover  to  embrace  Christianity  was  often 
to  incur  poverty.  Some  converts  were  driven  from  their 
homes;  some  had  to  relinquish  employments  which  the 
Christian  discipline  could  not  tolerate.  In  time  of 
persecution  those  in  prison,  or  whose  property  was  confis- 
cated, had  to  be  supported,  those  sold  into  slavery  to  be 
ransomed,  and  the  widows  and  orphans  of  the  martyrs 
to  be  provided  for.  The  demand  was  heavy  upon  the 
churches  and  it  met  with  full  response  from  the  glad 
eagerness  of  brotherly  love.1  That  "Christ's  poor" 
were  called  an  ' '  altar  of  sacrifice ' '  witnesses  to  the  feeling 
that  what  was  given  them  was  given  to  God,  that  the 
altar  of  Christian  worship  was  the  altar  of  human  need.2 

1  That  the  communities  were  able  as  well  as  willing  to  respond  to  the 
calls  upon  their  liberality  corroborates  the  assertion  of  Dobschutz  that  the 
main  body  of  their  membership  was  drawn  from  the  middle  class  of  society 
and  not  from  the  proletariat.     See  Harnack  to  the  same  effect:     Constitu- 
tion and  Law  of  the  Church  in  the  First  Two  Centuries,  139. 

2  Heb.  xiii,  16:     "To  do  good  and  to  communicate  forget  not,  for  with 
such  sacrifices  God  is  well  pleased." 


Catholicism  325 

The  poor  and  hungry,  the  weak  and  ill-used,  the  friendless 
and  helpless,  to  all  these  the  Christian  brotherhood 
opened  arms  of  invitation  and  drew  them  within  the 
shelter  of  its  sympathy.  Not  in  the  working  of  miracles, 
but  in  these  wonders  of  love  lay  the  power  by  which 
Christianity  overcame  the  world.  It  was  the  provision  of 
a  wise  economy  that  the  gifts  of  Christian  charity  were 
not  made  privately  and  directly  to  those  in  need,  but  to 
almoners  specially  charged  with  the  care  of  the  poor, 
and  it  naturally  followed  that  the  administration  of  the 
fund  created  by  the  offerings  of  the  community  became  a 
function  of  great  and  growing  importance.  It  is  signifi- 
cant of  this  importance  that  when  the  bishop  of  after 
days  had  gathered  to  himself  all  the  powers  inherent  in  the 
early  Christian  democracy  the  title  which  clung  to  him 
was  the  one  relative  to  his  original  function,  now  merged 
and  lost  in  his  wealth  of  dignities. 

At  the  same  time  our  texts  show  that  besides  the 
control  of  the  finances  the  Episkopos  is  charged  with  a 
general  moral  control  of  the  brethren,  and  it  is  his  duty 
to  maintain  observance  of  the  unwritten  rules  that  govern 
the  collective  life  and  secure  the  good  order  of  the  com- 
munity. With  unrestricted  freedom  of  speech  and 
individualism  running  riot,  men's  minds  were  confused 
by  a  clamor  of  contrary  teachings  concerning  both  belief 
and  practice,  and  thus  it  was  a  matter  of  prime  necessity 
to  the  writer  of  the  Pastorals  and  his  fellow  churchmen 
that  the  sacred  deposit,  the  so-called  apostolic  tradition 
in  course  of  formation,  should  be  committed  to  the  hands 
of  faithful  guardians  of  discipline.  To  gain  submissive 
acceptance  of  the  "sound  doctrine"  under  the  conditions 
that  prevailed  was  a  task  requiring  tact.  The  Episkopos 
is  admonished  to  exercise  authority  as  a  wise  father  rules 
his  family,  with  gentle  firmness  and  without  arrogance 
or  harshness,  and  the  insistence  on  his  moral  qualifica- 


326  Catholicism 

tions  shows  that  the  personal  equation  is  held  to  count 
for  much  in  winning  the  prestige  that  is  sought  for  the 
episcopal  office.1  The  prevalence  of  the  traditional 
teaching  is,  then,  the  essential  point,  and  it  is  not  only  as 
holder  of  the  purse  strings  but  even  more  as  defender  of 
the  faith  that  the  Episkopos  rises  to  predominance.  In 
Asia  Minor,  as  in  Syria,  he  has  added  to  his  administra- 
tive functions  the  ministry  of  the  word ; 2  for  it  is  his  duty 
to  refute  false  teaching,  or  if  more  convenient,  to  suppress 
it  by  stopping  the  mouths  of  vain  talkers  and  deceivers.3 
Thus  early  have  the  builders  of  episcopal  power  discovered 
that  the  most  practical  method  of  establishing  orthodox 
doctrine  is  to  silence  its  adversaries.4 

In  Acts  xx,  28,  as  in  the  Didache  and  the  Epistle  to 
the  Philippians,  Episkopoi  are  mentioned  in  the  plural, 
but  the  language  of  the  Pastorals  intimates  that  at  their 
later  date  the  churches  of  Asia  had  each  a  single  Episko- 
pos. It  is  possible  of  course  that  T&V  exfjKoicov  in  I  Tim. 
iii,  2,  and  Titus  i,  7  may  refer  to  a  category  rather  than  to 
an  individual.  But  since  in  the  context  the  writer  is 
speaking  of  deacons,  women,  and  elders  as  individuals,  to 
speak  of  bishops  as  an  order  would  be  an  abrupt  transi- 
tion hard  to  account  for.  And  since  these  others  are 
mentioned  in  the  plural,  why  should  we  not  find  "bishops  " 

1  So  in  I  Peter  v,  2-3  it  is  urged  that  the  Episkopoi  in  their  office  of 
supervision  conduct  themselves  not  harshly  but  persuasively  (if  this  may 
be  taken  for  the  sense  of  M  foayKaffrfa,  d\X'  &coi;<r/ws)  and  not  lording  it 
over  their  charge  but  making  themselves  patterns  to  the  flock. 

2 1  Tim.  iii,  2;  Titus  i,  9.  3  Titus  i,  lo-ii. 

4  "The  Epistle  to  Titus  is  the  earliest  document  in  which  'heretics' 
are  mentioned.  The  heretic  is  to  be  admonished  once,  twice;  if  he  does  not 
yield  he  is  to  be  rejected.  Here  we  have  the  new  conception  of  heresy. 
Heresy  is  deviation  from  the  teaching  of  the  Church  and  as  such  involves 
condemnation  and  exclusion.  Already  the  contrast  is  no  longer  between 
good  and  bad,  but  between  believing  and  unbelieving.  The  Church  won 
the  day,  but  at  the  cost  of  uniformity  and  rigidity.  The  old  freedom 
vanished  and  with  it  the  rich  and  varied  life  of  the  first  age."  Wernle, 
op.  cit.  ii,  233-234. 


Catholicism  327 

also  in  the  plural  if  there  were  more  than  one?  Indeed, 
the  use  of  the  definite  article  seems  almost  decisive  of  the 
question:  if  there  were  a  number  of  bishops  one  would 
naturally  write,  ''bishops  must  be  blameless,"  etc.,  or 
"a  bishop  must  be  blameless."  On  the  whole  the  expres- 
sion, "the  bishop  must  be  blameless"  can  hardly  be  taken 
otherwise  than  as  signifying  that  there  was  but  one  bishop 
in  each  church.1  The  transition  from  the  plural  episco- 
pate to  the  single  bishop  must  have  taken  place  at  some 
time  before  the  appearance  of  the  omnipotent  bishop  of 
the  next  century,  and  it  marks  the  first  stage  in  the 
evolution  of  that  personage.  It  was  a  change  that  came 
about  at  different  moments  in  different  localities,  and  in 
the  churches  of  Hellenic  Asia  it  must  have  been  effected 
during  the  years  between  the  composition  of  the  Acts 
and  that  of  the  Ignatian  Epistles,  and  it  is  in  this  period 
that  the  Pastorals  were  written. 

The  motive  for  merging  the  episcopate  in  a  single  indi- 
vidual may  be  gathered  from  the  nature  of  the  duties 
which  we  have  seen  were  assigned  to  the  Episkopoi.  In 
these  Eastern  churches,  seething  with  all  sorts  of  dangerous 
doctrines,  the  protection  and  preservation  of  the  ' ' deposit," 
the  tradition  of  belief  and  practice,  was  a  charge  that  would 
be  more  safely  entrusted  to  one  person  than  to  many, 
among  whom  authority  and  responsibility  must  be  divided, 
and  differing  interpretations  of  Christian  truth  might  lead 
to  error  or  confusion.  It  was  the  need  of  distinguishing 
the  true  Christian  teaching  derived  from  Christ  or  Paul 
from  the  many  speculative  theories  that  were  threatening 
to  take  its  place  that  above  all  led  these  churches  to  confide 

1  Such  is  the  significance  that  Harnack  attaches  to  the  passages  in  ques- 
tion (The  Constitution  and  Law  of  the  Church  in  the  First  Two  Centuries, 
67-68),  but  he  remarks  that  they  are  probably  interpolations,  without 
assigning  any  grounds  for  the  probability.  Of  course  if  one  is  persuaded 
that  the  single  bishop  could  not  have  appeared  at  so  early  a  date,  any  pas- 
sage to  the  contrary  effect  will  naturally  be  regarded  as  an  interpolation. 


328  Catholicism 

to  a  single  person  the  representation  of  this  authentic 
tradition.  We  have  evidence  of  this  in  the  fact  that  the 
one  bishop  makes  his  first  appearance  in  the  documents 
where  alarm  at  the  invasion  of  subversive  doctrines  and 
strenuous  insistence  on  fidelity  to  the  "healthful  teaching," 
the  certified  tradition,  declare  themselves  for  the  first 
time.  Other  considerations  contributed  to  bring  about 
the  change  in  question.  When  as  administrators  of  the 
material  interests  of  the  Church  the  Episkopoi  were 
brought  into  more  frequent  relations  with  the  world 
without,  it  was  an  evident  advantage  that  affairs  should  be 
transacted  by  a  single  official.  One  cannot  well  negotiate 
with  a  number  of  people,  nor  can  they  jointly  manage 
the  same  business  dealing  with  efficiency.  It  is  a  further 
advantage  in  business  that  one  be  known  for  an  honorable 
man,  and  we  find  it  a  specific  requirement  of  the  Episkopos 
that  he  be  held  in  good  repute  by  those  without.  The 
personage  in  charge  of  the  "temporalities  "  of  the  Christian 
association  was  the  one  the  Pagans  were  best  acquainted 
with,  the  spiritual  activities  of  others  escaping  their 
notice,  and  it  was  important  that  he  who  was  in  their 
eyes  the  representative  of  the  community  should  bear  a 
character  above  reproach.  Such  a  character  moreover 
was  a  protection  from  measures  of  repression  which 
might  be  taken  at  any  moment  against  associations  exist- 
ing only  at  the  good  pleasure  of  the  civil  authority. 
Again,  the  idea  of  the  unity  of  the  Church,  one  Church  of 
God  embracing  all  disciples  of  Christ  however  widely 
scattered  and  separated,  was  deep  rooted  in  the  Christian 
consciousness,  and  the  sentiment  of  brotherhood  lent  a 
capital  importance  to  the  intercourse  of  church  with 
church.  Now  that  the  itinerant  prophets  and  evangelists 
who  had  done  so  much  to  link  the  churches  in  the  bond 
of  unity  were  diminishing  in  number  or  deteriorating  in 
character,  it  could  not  be  left  to  unauthorised  individuals 


Catholicism  329 

to  carry  on  the  communications  between  the  churches. 
If  it  was  found  preferable  to  have  one  negotiator  in  deal- 
ing with  the  Pagans,  still  more  the  close  relations  of  the 
communities  with  one  another  demanded  that  each  should 
be  personified  in  a  single  representative,  that  they  might 
know  with  whom  they  had  to  deal  in  discussing  matters 
of  common  interest. 

The  distinction,  then,  that  appears  between  the  functions 
of  the  Presbyter  and  the  Episkopos  is  roughly  speaking 
that  between  spiritual  and  secular.  The  Presbyters  are 
pastors  of  the  flock;  their  concern  is  with  morals  and 
religion,  with  the  inner  Christian  life,  and  they  form  the 
governing  council  of  the  community  because  it  is  es- 
sentially a  religious  community  founded  on  the  faith  in 
Christ.  The  Episkopos  deals  rather  with  the  outer  life 
of  the  society;  he  is  charged  with  the  care  of  its  material 
interests,  with  the  maintenance  of  order  and  the  observ- 
ance of  the  rules,  and  these  powers  of  administration 
and  discipline  lead  him  to  become  the  representative  of 
the  community  in  its  external  relations.  The  function 
that  was  common  to  bishops  and  presbyters  and  seems 
to  render  them  indistinguishable  is  precisely  the  one 
which  originally  belonged  to  neither.  It  was  inevitable 
that  the  ministry  of  preaching  and  teaching,  one  of  capital 
importance  in  a  society  devoted  to  the  spiritual  life, 
should  be  assumed  by  the  church  officials  as  soon  as  the 
ecclesiastical  organisation  acquired  a  certain  solidity, 
whether  the  charismatic  prophets  and  teachers  were  be- 
coming fewer,  as  in  the  more  remote  communities  of 
Syria,  or  whether  on  the  other  hand  they  were  too  numer- 
ous and  their  rampant  individualism  embarrassing  to  the 
conductors  of  a  regular  government.  The  difference 
between  the  offices  of  presbyter  and  bishop  probably 
entailed  a  difference  in  the  character  of  their  teaching. 
That  of  the  spiritual  counsellors  would  be  moral  and 


330  Catholicism 

practical,  a  regular  and  continuous  religious  instruction; 
that  of  the  guardian  of  discipline  would  be  occasional,  as 
he  was  called  upon  to  oppose  teachings  at  variance  with 
the  apostolic  tradition. 

Although  the  episcopate  and  the  presbyterate  were 
from  the  first  two  different  institutions,  they  were  at  this 
time  in  close  relations.  And  naturally  enough,  for  a  study 
of  Christian  origins  leads  to  the  conclusion  that  while 
in  these  Asiatic  churches  the  bishop  was  in  theory  elected 
by  the  community — that  is,  it  was  in  the  power  of  the 
assembly  to  accept  or  reject  the  candidate  nominated 
by  the  presbyteral  council — practically  the  presbyters 
controlled  the  election  of  the  bishop,  who  was  in  most 
cases  one  of  themselves.  Bishops  and  Presbyters,  then,  are 
the  ecclesiastical  authorities  the  Pastorals  bring  to  our 
notice;  of  the  more  humble  but  not  less  useful  ministers 
it  is  unnecessary  to  speak  at  length.  The  Deacons  and 
Deaconesses  were  agents  of  the  Bishop  and  assistants  of 
the  Presbyters.  In  their  constant  relations  with  the 
members  of  the  church  individually,  they  were  inter- 
mediaries between  them  and  the  higher  officers,  and  it  was 
their  special  service  to  care  for  the  poor,  the  sick,  the 
orphans,  all  who  had  need  of  sympathy  and  aid,  material 
or  moral. 

The  Pastorals  witness  to  an  ecclesiastical  development 
that  has  made  rapid  strides  since  the  days  of  the  Apostle 
Paul. 

These  writings  bring  before  our  eyes  that  great  trans- 
formation in  Christendom,  the  last  result  of  which  was  the 
Catholic  Church.  They  show  us  how  under  the  perplexing 
influence  of  suspicious  phases  of  Hellenism  the  need  arose 
for  stricter  organisation  of  the  Christian  communities,  for 
closer  adherence  to  the  authorities  of  the  past,  for  the  creation 
of  living  authorities  which  should  represent  these.  They 
show  us  how  the  purely  religious  interest  gradually  fell  into 


Catholicism  331 

the  background  compared  with  doctrinal  interests,  and  how 
in  the  place  of  living  spiritual  forces  now  appeared  ordinances, 
offices,  regulations.1 

In  the  view  of  Baron  Von  Soden  such  documents  as 
these  cannot  be  of  early  date,  and  First  Timothy  at 
least  must  be  assigned  to  the  second  or  third  decade  of  the 
second  century.  It  must  be  remembered  however  that 
the  movement  toward  Catholicism  did  not  proceed  every- 
where at  an  even  rate  of  progress,  but  varied  with  varying 
conditions,  and  in  these  important  churches  of  Hellenic 
Asia  which  the  Pastorals  have  in  view  conditions  were 
such  that  their  organisation  was  more  advanced  than  that 
which  obtained  elsewhere.  Moreover,  what  the  Pastorals 
contain  are  the  instructions  and  exhortations  the  Apostle 
is  supposed  to  give  his  deputies  to  prepare  them  for  their 
mission  to  the  churches.  The  governmental  and  ad- 
ministrative system  which  the  author  depicts  may  repre- 
sent, as  I  have  remarked  above,  an  ideal  to  realise  rather 
than  the  real  situation.  But  it  matters  little  whether  the 
ecclesiastical  constitution  of  the  Pastorals  existed  in  the 
first  years  of  the  century  or  came  into  existence  some  years 
later.  If  these  are  not  present  conditions  they  are  those 
of  the  near  future ;  the  advocate  of  ecclesiastical  principles 
might  be  sure  of  the  early  triumph  of  his  cause.  And  so 
these  principles  took  root  in  the  soil  where  Paul  had  so 
laboriously  sown  the  seeds  of  religious  freedom  and 
individualism.  Losing  faith  in  the  intrinsic  power  of 
truth,  it  seemed  to  his  degenerate  disciples  that  the  safety 
of  the  Pauline  gospel  demanded  the  establishment  of  a 
strong  ecclesiastical  authority.  Their  success  is  easily 
explained.  Enthusiasm  has  little  need  of  official  regula- 
tions and  external  ordinances,  and  it  is  only  with  the 
waning  of  enthusiasm  that  these  gain  power  and  multiply. 
1  Von  Soden,  op.  cit.t  323. 


332  Catholicism 

1 '  Where  the  spirit  of  the  Lord  is  there  is  liberty, ' '  and  when 
the  sense  of  inspiration  by  that  spirit  grew  faint  men  lost 
the  courage  of  their  faith  in  the  spirit  of  man;  they  began 
to  distrust  themselves,  their  confident  ardor  in  the  pursuit 
of  the  ideal  began  to  cool,  and  they  were  ready  to  sur- 
render their  religious  life  to  the  direction  of  others. 

c.     The  Rise  of  the  Hierarchy 

With  the  close  of  the  first  century,  signs  of  change 
coming  over  the  Christian  communities  appear  in  a 
stricter  exclusiveness  toward  those  without  and  a  more 
jealous  supervision  of  those  within.  Gradually  faith  in 
Christ  is  changing  from  a  soul  experience  to  acceptance 
of  a  dogmatic  creed,  and  with  this  it  becomes  necessary 
that  baptism  should  be  preceded  by  instruction.  It  follows 
that  a  sharper  line  of  distinction  is  drawn  between  be- 
lievers and  unbelievers,  baptised  and  unbaptised,  and 
missionary  effort  is  relaxed  in  the  Christian's  anxiety  to 
keep  himself  unspotted  from  the  world.  So  too  within 
the  churches  reliance  on  personal  inspiration  disappears 
and  everything  is  subjected  to  fixed  regulation.  The 
charisma  of  ruling,  it  has  been  said,  like  an  Aaron's  rod 
swallowed  up  all  the  others,  and  the  early  freedom  and 
spontaneity  of  life  was  checked  by  a  disposition  to  regard 
the  Gospel  as  a  new  law  administered  by  a  governing  class. 

In  the  Pastoral  Epistles,  which  have  been  called  the 
preface  to  the  Epistles  of  Ignatius,  we  see  the  bending  of 
the  twig.  Yet  the  change  that  was  taking  place  from  the 
primitive  democracy  to  an  oligarchy  of  spiritual  rulers 
was  not  everywhere  accomplished  without  exciting  opposi- 
tion. We  know  of  one  case,  and  doubtless  one  of  many, 
in  which  the  new  movement  encountered  the  resistance  of 
the  old  free  spirit  that  still  lived  in  the  communities.  In 
the  church  of  Corinth,  where  from  the  first  individualism 


Catholicism  333 

had  claimed  freedom  for  the  utterance  of  religious  feeling, 
the  attempt  to  enforce  strict  and  unchangeable  regulations 
for  the  conduct  of  worship  and  the  celebration  of  the 
Eucharist  roused  a  vigorous  protest,  and  the  assembly 
removed  the  officials,  bishops  and  deacons,  who  in  its 
judgment  had  assumed  undue  authority.  This  was  the 
incident  that  called  forth  a  document  which  throws 
revealing  light  on  this  time  of  transition,  the  Epistle  of 
Clement,  or  the  Letter  sent  by  "the  church  of  God  which 
dwells  at  Rome  to  the  church  of  God  which  dwells  at 
Corinth."  It  is  the  writer's  contention  that  bishops  and 
deacons  are  irremovable;  their  office,  conferred  by  in- 
stallation, is  conferred  for  life,  and  the  right  to  exercise 
its  functions  is  inalienable.1  He  denounces  the  action 
of  the  community,  which  was  well  within  its  ancient 
powers,  as  a  seditious  revolt  fomented  by  ignorant  pre- 
sumptuous agitators,  whom  he  assails  with  all  the  epithets 
which  clerical  authority  holds  ready  to  shower  upon  any 
who  do  not  show  themselves  properly  submissive.  He 
summons  the  Corinthians  to  repent  of  their  grievous  sin 
and  submit  themselves  to  those  set  over  them, — or  not  to 
them  but  to  the  will  of  God.  For  it  is  the  theory  of  the 
Epistle  that  the  organisation  of  the  Church  was  established 
under  inspiration  of  the  Holy  Spirit  and  is  of  divine 
authority ;  hence  those  who  have  charge  of  it  and  direct  its 
working  become  representatives  and  interpreters  of  the 
Divine.  Thus  in  this  Letter  of  A.D.  96,  or  perhaps  a  few 
years  later,  we  have  not  only  the  first  appearance  of 
ecclesiastical  law  in  the  assertion  of  a  fixed  order  in  the 
Church,  holding  by  divine  right,  but  the  sacerdotal  idea 
emerges  into  view,  and  its  maleficent  consequent,  the 

1  It  may  be  said  that  Clement  admits  that  the  officers  only  hold  during 
good  behavior  and  are  removable  for  cause,  but  the  admission  counts  for 
little.  The  cause  of  removal  was  sufficient  in  the  eyes  of  the  Corinthian 
church,  but  its  right  to  be  judge  in  the  case  is  not  allowed. 


334  Catholicism 

separation  of  the  clergy  from  the  laity,  is  foreshadowed 
in  that  suggestion  of  the  virtual  continuance  of  the  Jewish 
priesthood  in  the  Church  which  was  to  furnish  the  pre- 
vailing conception  of  the  Christian  ministry.  The  coming 
change  from  the  rule  of  the  Spirit  to  the  rule  of  the  bishop 
appears  in  the  theory  of  the  transmission  of  office  through 
a  chain  of  commissions  which  eventually  displaced  the 
primitive  idea  of  the  ministry  as  a  divine  vocation  ratified 
by  popular  consent.  According  to  Clement,  as  Christ 
was  sent  forth  from  God,  the  Apostles  were  sent  by  Christ, 
and  going  everywhere  preaching  the  word  they  appointed 
bishops  and  deacons  in  each  group  of  converts  for  the 
care  of  the  eucharistic  offerings  and  the  conduct  of  religious 
services  (XeiToupyfocq).  Thus  all — Christ,  his  Apostles  and 
their  appointees — come  of  God  in  regular  order.  This 
doctrine  was  an  ingenious  invention,  for  the  only  authority 
recognised  in  the  early  Church  was  the  authority  of 
Christ,  and  the  only  way  to  establish  a  government  of  men 
was  to  assert  that  this  had  been  established  in  the  beginning 
by  the  Apostles  under  Christ's  direction.  And  it  was 
not  a  new  thing  for  which  men  were  unprepared,  for  the 
Scriptures  (Is.  Ix,  17)  had  long  ago  foretold  the  institu- 
tion of  these  church  officials.  When  we  find  bishops  and 
deacons  in  the  prophecies  of  Isaiah  we  cannot  reasonably 
object  to  their  derivation  from  Apostolic  ordination. 
As  to  the  further  succession  Clement  is  not  prepared  to  go 
the  length  of  his  theory.  He  says  the  Apostles  provided 
that  when  the  first  bishops  should  fall  asleep  their  place 
should  be  filled  by  others  appointed  by  men  of  repute 
with  the  approval  of  the  whole  Church.  The  doctrine  of 
Apostolic  Succession  is  not  mature  as  yet,  but  we  see  that 
the  same  principle  of  apostolicity  is  about  to  be  claimed 
in  support  of  hierarchical  pretensions  which  was  invoked 
with  equal  disregard  of  historic  fact  in  the  case  of  the 
Creed  and  the  Canon. 


Catholicism  335 

In  this  Letter,  or  Treatise,  of  sixty-five  chapters,  whose 
whole  purpose  is  to  enforce  obedience  to  ecclesiastical 
authorities,  there  is  not  the  most  distant  allusion  to  the 
superiority  of  the  individual  episcopate  for  the  mainte- 
nance of  order  in  the  Church,  not  the  slightest  indication 
of  disapproval  of  the  plurality  in  the  community  Clement 
addressed,  and  no  appeal  to  a  different  order  of  things 
in  his  own.  Yet  episcopal  monarchy  was  the  institution 
which  more  than  any  other  would  serve  the  interest  of  his 
cause,  and  to  leave  it  unmentioned  in  such  a  document 
as  this  amounts  to  little  less  than  a  formal  declaration 
that  it  did  not  yet  exist  in  the  church  of  Rome  any  more 
than  in  that  of  Corinth. x  But  if  the  single  bishop  arrived 
in  the  West  at  a  later  date  than  in  the  East,  the  Letter 
witnesses  to  the  early  date  of  the  ecclesiastical  principles 
with  whose  development  the  Catholic  Church  took  rise. 
This  Letter  is  in  fact  the  first  Catholic  document  of 
early  Christian  literature.  And  these  principles  are 
asserted  in  a  manner  even  more  Roman  than  Catholic. 
Never  before  had  one  so  exalted  the  authority  of  church 
dignitaries  or  made  submission  to  them  the  chief  virtue 
of  the  Christian.  Daughter  of  Jewish  sacerdotalism  and 
of  ancient  Rome,  with  its  instinct  of  domination,  its 
spirit  of  discipline,  its  superstitious  respect  for  ritual  and 
for  tradition,  the  Roman  Church  revealed  in  its  first 
utterances  the  character  it  had  inherited  from  its  spirit- 
ual ancestors.  Thus  ritualism,  sacerdotalism,  the  para- 
mount rule  of  tradition,  ecclesiastical  authority  founded 
on  the  regular  succession  of  leaders  of  the  churches,  obedi- 
ence to  them  declared  the  equivalent  of  obedience  to  God 
— all  these  principles  of  the  Roman  Catholic  conception 
of  the  Church  are  found  in  the  earliest  letter  signed  by  the 
Church  of  Rome.  How  Roman  too  is  this  intervention 

1 J.  R6ville,  Les  Origines  de  V Episcopal,  420-429,  where  this  question 
is  treated  at  length. 


336  Catholicism 

in  the  internal  affairs  of  another  community.  What  a  tone 
of  paternal  reproach,  revealing  the  sense  of  superiority, 
as  of  a  master  calling  his  pupils  to  order.  From  its 
cradle  Christian  Rome  has  drunk  the  milk  of  the  imperial 
city  and  feels  itself  called  to  rule  the  world.  The  mon- 
archical episcopate  may  spring  up  in  the  East,  but  it  will 
find  in  Rome  its  congenial  soil  where  it  will  grow  till  one 
day  it  will  supplant  the  Rome  of  the  Caesars.  x 

It  was  probably  during  the  sojourn  of  Trajan  at  Antioch 
(114-115)  that  Ignatius,  bishop  of  the  church  in  that  city, 
was  brought  before  him  and  condemned  to  be  sent  to 
Rome  and  given  over  to  the  wild  beasts  in  the  arena.  It 
is  not  unlikely  that  the  condemnation  was  occasioned 
by  the  devastating  earthquake  of  the  year  115  which 
proclaimed  the  wrath  of  the  gods  at  the  toleration  of  im- 
piety and  roused  the  fury  of  the  people  against  the  Chris- 
tians. In  the  course  of  his  protracted  journey  to  the 
capital  Ignatius  wrote  a  number  of  letters  to  the  churches, 
the  question  of  whose  authenticity  has  been  the  theme  of  a 
long  debate,  for  they  are  so  extreme  in  their  advocacy 
of  episcopal  authority  that  many  scholars  are  convinced 
they  are  pseudepigraphs  of  the  second  half  of  the  second 
century.  We  could  scarcely  avoid  this  conclusion  if  we 
accepted  the  implied  premises  on  which  it  is  based,  the 
assumption  of  the  unity  and  uniformity  of  early  Christian 
society,  and  the  regular,  even  development  of  ecclesiastical 
organisation  in  all  the  churches.  But  that  cherished  fancy 
is  at  variance  with  the  facts  of  history — not  less  so  than 
the  fancied  unity  of  theological  ideas  in  the  New  Testa- 
ment, which  long  ago  yielded  to  the  recognition  of  at 
least  three  well-defined  types  or  modes  of  thought  which 
were  called  the  Petrine,  Pauline,  and  Johanean.  In 
dealing  with  documents  relating  to  the  ecclesiastical 
situation  at  the  opening  of  the  second  century  it  is  impor- 
1 J.  R6ville,  op.  cit.t  440-441. 


Catholicism  337 

tant  to  note  the  geographical  region  whence  they  proceed. 
To  suppose  that  the  conditions  among  one  group  of 
primitive  Christians  are  those  that  obtain  in  another  is  to 
shut  our  eyes  to  the  marked  differences  which  appear 
between  the  ideas  and  institutions  of  the  Jewish  Christians 
of  Jerusalem,  of  the  inheritors  of  the  original  Gospel 
tradition  in  the  Syro-Palestinian  regions,  of  the  Pauline 
communities  of  Asia  Minor  and  of  the  church  of  Rome. 
It  is  evident  to  open  eyes  that  there  was  no  unique  type 
of  church  government  at  this  time,  and  that  the  different 
forms  adopted  by  the  communities  did  not  develop  in  the 
same  manner.  Though  the  sentiment  of  ecclesiastical 
authority  nowhere  found  more  emphatic  expression  than 
at  Rome,  it  was  in  the  troubled  churches  of  Asia  Minor, 
rent  by  heretical  teaching  and  party  spirit,  that  intolerant 
orthodoxy  and  the  individual  episcopate  first  appeared; 
and  to  these  churches  is  now  addressed  a  fiery  proclama- 
tion of  the  spiritual  royalty  of  the  single  bishop,  to  whom 
the  faithful  owe  blind  obedience.  It  is  this  in  the  Ignatian 
Epistles  which,  as  I  have  said,  has  led  to  the  assertion  that 
they  are  forgeries  of  a  date  fifty  or  sixty  years  later.  It 
cannot  be  denied  that  this  is  a  legitimate  hypothesis; 
it  is  not  only  in  the  Donation  of  Constantine  and  the 
Decretals  of  Isidor  that  defenders  of  ecclesiastical  power 
have  shown  themselves  unscrupulous  in  their  use  of  forged 
material  to  support  their  claims.  And  yet  I  cannot  find 
that  the  case  is  made  out  against  the  authenticity  of  these 
Letters :  that  is,  the  Seven  of  the  shorter  Greek  recension. x 
If  we  give  due  weight  to  the  evidence  of  the  Pastorals  and 
the  Epistle  of  Clement  touching  the  ecclesiastical  situa- 

1  The  three  Epistles  of  the  Syriac  version  are  abridgements  of  this  Greek 
text,  and  not  a  translation  of  an  original  text  less  full,  as  has  been  main- 
tained. I  have  no  space  to  argue  this  point  which  after  all  is  not  of  capital 
importance.  The  long  Greek  recension  is  of  the  fourth  century,  later  than 
Eusebius,  and  the  inauthenticity  of  the  other  six  of  its  thirteen  Epistles  is 
beyond  discussion. 


338  Catholicism 

tion  at  the  opening  of  the  second  century  we  shall  be  led 
to  see  that  the  contrast  between  them  and  the  Ignatian 
Epistles  is  after  all  superficial,  and  concerns  the  form 
rather  than  the  substance  of  their  testimony.  While  the 
tone  of  the  former  is  measured  and  serious  as  befits 
quasi-official  documents,  the  hasty  effusions  of  Ignatius, 
dispatched  during  his  deportation  are  the  improvisations  of 
an  enthusiast,  and  his  excited  utterances  have  not  equal 
importance  to  the  historian  with  those  of  his  more  sober 
contemporaries. 

That  Irenaeus,  Origen,  and  Lucian,  the  satirist,  were 
acquainted  with  these  Epistles  is  not  conclusive  of  Ignatian 
authorship,  for  Irenaeus,  the  earliest  of  the  three,  was 
born  some  years  after  the  martyr's  death,  but  we  have  the 
plain  statement  of  his  contemporary  Polycarp  in  an  epistle 
to  the  Philippians  that  Ignatius  wrote  a  letter  to  him,  and 
other  letters  also  which  he  is  sending  to  his  correspondents. 
This  seems  so  nearly  decisive  of  the  question  that  critics 
who  impugn  the  authenticity  of  the  Ignatian  Epistles 
have  found  it  necessary  to  maintain  that  this  Epistle 
of  Polycarp  is  also  a  forgery  whose  purpose  is  to  furnish 
support  to  the  Ignatian  forgeries.  I  cannot  go  into  this 
question  and  must  be  content  to  say  that  the  attack  on 
the  Epistle  encounters  insuperable  obstacles;  this  writing 
lends  itself  very  ill  to  the  imputation  of  forgery,  and  the 
entirety  of  pseudepigraphic  literature  has  no  instance  of 
a  forger  who  proceeded  as  this  one  must  have  done.  To 
the  direct  testimony  of  Polycarp  may  be  added  some 
considerations  in  rebuttal  of  the  charge  of  forgery  brought 
against  the  Ignatian  Epistles.  How  can  it  be  supposed 
that  in  the  latter  half  of  the  second  century  an  author, 
imbued  with  the  sentiments  expressed  in  these  Letters, 
should  plead  so  warmly  the  cause  of  ecclesiastical  discipline 
and  episcopal  authority  without  making  the  slightest 
allusion  to  Montanism,  which  at  this  time  was  creating 


Catholicism  339 

such  commotion  in  the  churches  of  Asia  and  which  was 
directly  subversive  of  all  ecclesiastical  authority?  Or 
how  can  it  be  supposed  that  this  author  who,  as  appears 
from  the  Letters,  holds  all  philosophical  speculation  in 
horror  and  is  passionately  opposed  to  the  gnostic  doctrines, 
should  direct  all  his  attack  upon  Docetism,  a  primitive 
form  of  Gnosticism  at  this  time  out  of  date,  and  make  no 
mention  of  the  great  gnostic  systems  which  were  pro- 
foundly troubling  the  churches  both  of  the  East  and 
West,  nor  give  any  sign  of  being  aware  of  the  existence 
of  Marcion,  Basilides,  Valentinus,  and  the  rest?  Again, 
it  is  hard  to  see  why  this  ardent  advocate  of  episcopacy, 
anxious  to  win  assent  to  the  extension  of  episcopal  power, 
should  place  his  writings  under  the  patronage  of  a  Syrian 
bishop  little  known  and  of  no  great  authority,  who  had 
never  written  a  line  upon  the  theme  this  author  has  so 
much  at  heart.  It  is  the  way  with  fabricators  of  pseud- 
epigraphs  to  attribute  them  to  personages  who  enjoy 
high  prestige  and  command  general  respect.  Thus  the 
Pastorals  appear  under  the  name  of  St.  Paul,  and  an 
apocalypse  is  given  out  under  that  of  Enoch,  Noah  or 
Moses.  Why  should  the  writer  of  the  Ignatian  Epistles 
have  acted  differently?  It  was  not  worth  while  to  take 
a  name  in  vain  unless  it  were  to  be  of  some  service  to  him. 
And  the  field  of  choice  was  open;  he  had  no  modern 
criticism  to  fear. 

The  Epistle  to  the  Romans  stands  apart  from  the  other 
six  Ignatian  Letters  in  respect  to  its  subject  matter. 
There  is  no  exaltation  of  the  monarchical  bishop,  nor  urging 
of  submission  to  the  constituted  authorities,  because,  for 
one  reason,  the  Roman  church  had  no  single  bishop  and 
nowhere  was  a  strict  ecclesiastical  discipline  more  securely 
established,  and  for  another  reason,  because  a  different 
subject  has  possession  of  the  prisoner's  mind,  one  so 
absorbing  that  it  is  no  wonder  he  thinks  of  little  else. 


34°  Catholicism 

He  writes  to  the  Romans  of  his  approaching  martyrdom, 
and  anxious  not  to  be  deprived  of  the  martyr's  crown 
by  their  solicitude  in  his  behalf,  he  begs  them  to  let  him 
die  for  God.  This  Letter  is  so  eloquent,  so  warm  with 
life,  that  it  is  hard  to  believe  it  a  fictitious  work,  and 
certain  critics  gifted  with  literary  tact,  notably  Renan, 
exempt  it  from  the  condemnation  pronounced  upon  the 
others.  It  seems  logical  that  the  authenticity  of  one 
creates  a  presumption  in  favor  of  the  other  Letters  by 
the  same  author,  but  this  these  critics  are  unwilling  to 
acknowledge.  They  start  from  the  fixed  idea  that  none 
of  the  Letters  in  his  name  can  be  attributed  to  Ignatius, 
and  then  they  are  obliged  to  admit  that  exception  must  be 
made  of  the  " Romans"  because  it  bears  incontestably 
the  stamp  of  genuineness;  but  they  will  not  allow  the 
family  to  benefit  by  the  certificate  of  orthodoxy  they 
have  granted  to  their  sister.  If  however  we  take  "Ro- 
mans" to  be  the  only  authentic  Epistle  of  the  Seven,  then 
it  must  seem  passing  strange  that  one  making  such 
exorbitant  claims  for  monarchical  episcopacy  should 
attach  his  arguments  and  exhortations  to  the  name  of  a 
writer  who  speaks  of  none  other  than  the  plural  episcopate 
and  never  mentions  the  bishop  of  Rome.  I  cannot  dwell 
upon  this  point  and  must  leave  it  with  the  summary 
statement  that  a  comparative  study  of  the  Epistles  should 
make  it  clear  to  an  impartial  mind  that  they  are  all  by  the 
same  author  and  inseparable.  The  position  of  those 
who  would  retain  "Romans"  and  reject  the  others  is 
untenable. 

The  only  serious  argument  against  the  Ignatian  Epistles 
is  based  upon  the  ardent  "episcopalism"  which  inspires 
them  throughout  and  stamps  them  for  Tendenz  Schriften. 
It  has  been  said  that  the  plain  sign  of  apocryphal  writ- 
ings is  their  showing  a  ' '  tendency, ' '  betraying  the  purpose 
for  which  they  were  composed.  It  is  obvious  that  the 


Catholicism  341 

Ignatian  Epistles  were  written  with  the  intent  to  fortify 
episcopal  authority  in  the  early  churches.  Therefore 
they  must  be  considered  apocryphal.  This  is,  logically, 
the  fallacious  conversion  of  A  into  A: — as,  for  instance 
all  dogs  are  animals,  therefore  all  animals  are  dogs.  If 
it  be  conceded  that  all  apocryphal  writings  are  tendency 
writings,  it  does  not  follow  that  all  tendency  writings 
are  apocryphal.  Of  all  productions  of  early  Christian 
literature  there  is  none  where  purpose  is  more  evident 
than  it  is  in  Cyprian's  famous  treatise  De  Unitate  Ecclesiae, 
but  no  one  dreams  of  suspecting  its  authenticity.  The 
essential  characteristic  of  apocryphal  and  pseudepigraphic 
writings  is  their  attributing  to  some  venerated  personage 
of  the  past  whose  name  lends  authority,  ideas,  principles, 
interests  which  the  real  author  is  devoted  to.  What 
betrays  him  is  the  incompatibility  of  his  ideas,  etc.,  with 
those  of  the  personage  whom  he  substitutes  for  himself,  or 
his  making  that  personage  speak  of  events  or  institutions 
he  could  have  no  knowledge  of  because  they  belong  to  a 
later  epoch.  In  the  present  case  the  question  is  whether 
the  principles  of  the  author  regarding  the  episcopal 
office  are  in  fact  incompatible  with  the  conditions  existent 
in  the  Asiatic  churches  in  the  time  of  Ignatius.  On  a 
careful  study  of  these  conditions,  this  incompatibility 
which  has  been  assumed  a  priori  tends  to  disappear. 

At  this  date  the  episcopate  was  an  institution  of  long 
standing  in  the  Christian  communities,  and  in  certain 
churches  of  Asia  the  regime  of  a  single  bishop  had  suc- 
ceeded to  that  of  the  plurality  which  obtained  elsewhere. 
We  have  noted  in  the  preceding  section  the  successive 
steps  by  which  the  bishop  rose  to  a  position  of  high 
authority.  At  first  he  was  an  official  in  charge  of  the 
financial  affairs  of  the  community.  These  embraced 
the  administration  of  the  poor  fund,  and  since  charity 
to  the  needy  filled  so  large  a  place  in  church  life,  this 


342  Catholicism 

office  of  chief  almoner  became  one  of  a  dignity  com- 
mensurate with  its  responsibility.  At  the  celebration  of 
the  Eucharist  the  offerings  were  presented  to  the  bishop 
and  it  was  he  who  presided  at  this  memorial  meal.  It 
may  be  from  following  the  practice  of  the  Greek  associa- 
tions, where  the  Episkopos  took  the  leading  part  in  the 
religious  rites,  or  from  the  close  connection  in  the  minds 
of  the  early  Christians  between  service  to  fellow-men  and 
the  worship  of  God,  but  however  it  came  about,  we  find 
that  bishops  and  deacons  were  the  regular  ministrants 
at  the  Lord's  Supper.  The  Epistle  of  Clement  tells  us 
that  such  was  the  case  at  Corinth.  The  power  to  main- 
tain order  in  the  community  and  to  repress  any  disturb- 
ance of  brotherly  unity  also  fell  to  the  bishop,  and  since 
in  the  Asiatic  churches  such  disturbances  were  occasioned 
by  the  promulgation  of  strange  doctrines  affecting  faith 
and  practice,  he  was  called  upon  to  define  and  uphold 
the  traditional  teaching  and  to  pronounce  with  authority 
concerning  Christian  truth.  It  brought  a  further  ac- 
cession to  the  prestige  of  the  bishop  when  to  him  the 
function  was  assigned  of  representing  the  church  in  its 
external  relations — its  intercourse  with  sister  churches 
and  its  dealing  with  pagan  citizens  of  the  community 
wherein  it  dwelt. 

Such  was  the  position  of  the  bishop  in  the  early  years  of 
the  second  century.  Insensibly,  as  it  seems,  he  had 
gathered  into  his  hands  a  great  and  growing  power,  and 
there  is  nothing  to  render  it  improbable  that  a  fiery 
partisan  of  episcopal  supremacy  should  write  these  Letters 
commending  it  to  the  churches  as  a  panacea  for  all  their 
ills.  In  cities  like  Ephesus,  Smyrna,  Philadelphia,  on  the 
high  road  between  East  and  West,  where  Asiatic  myths 
and  rituals  encountered  the  rationalism  and  "sophistry" 
of  the  Greeks,  these  warring  influences,  together  with 
that  of  Docetism  on  the  one  hand  and  of  Judaic  traditions 


Catholicism  343 

on  the  other,  were  rending  the  churches  into  discordant 
factions.  In  the  eyes  of  Ignatius  it  has  become  the  one 
imperative  urgency  for  the  members  of  a  church  to  be 
united,  and  to  maintain  the  ecclesiastical  unity  which  is 
the  outward  sign  of  unity  in  the  spirit.  The  dissemina- 
tors of  false  doctrine  and  the  schismatics  and  heretics, 
their  converts,  he  assails  with  furious  denunciation,  and 
would  have  them  looked  upon  as  wild  beasts  or  mad  dogs. 
Division,  he  insists,  is  the  root  of  all  evil,  and  then  comes 
the  prophylactic :  it  is  to  rally  around  the  bishop  in  each 
community.  The  bishop  is  the  representative  of  that 
ecclesiastical  unity  which  to  Ignatius  is  of  prime  import- 
ance ;  he  is  its  embodiment  and  personification.  In  these 
churches  of  Asia  simple  Christians  were  facing  the  same 
questions  which  had  arisen  elsewhere,  but  for  them  had 
become  more  difficult  and  troubling.  Amidst  all  the 
different  doctrines  and  practices  commended  for  accept- 
ance by  all  sorts  of  persons  who  claimed  divine  inspiration 
or  superior  knowledge  or  possession  of  authoritative 
tradition,  how  was  one  to  know  what  to  believe,  what  to 
do,  whom  to  follow  ?  Doubtless  there  was  but  one  Christ, 
but  one  Gospel,  and  there  ought  to  be  but  one  Church, 
but  how  was  the  unity  of  Christian  faith  and  life  to  be 
attained?  The  Didache  replied:  Judge  prophets  by 
their  works;  if  their  conduct  conforms  to  the  moral 
precepts  of  the  Lord  as  we  have  received  them,  they  are 
worthy  of  deference.  Here  the  rule  or  standard,  con- 
formity to  which  brings  unity,  is  the  teaching  of  Jesus 
himself,  the  Galilean  Gospel.  The  Pastorals  replied: 
Hold  to  the  sound  doctrine  transmitted  by  Paul  to  his 
associates  and  by  them  to  the  elders  and  the  bishop. 
Here  the  standard  is  the  Pauline  doctrinal  tradition. 
The  Epistle  of  Clement  replied:  Submit  yourselves  to 
the  heads  of  the  church,  have  done  with  discussions  and 
individual  inspirations,  and  keep  faithfully  to  the  pre- 


344  Catholicism 

scribed  religious  observances  under  the  direction  of  your 
elders  and  bishops,  for  their  authority  derives  from  the 
Apostles  and  from  Christ.  Here  the  standard  is  the  ritual 
tradition  ascending  to  the  Levitical  Law  and  transmitted 
from  the  elder  dispensation.  Ignatius,  who  is  neither 
theologian  nor  traditionalist,  goes  straight  to  the  one 
idea  of  his  narrow  mind  and  replies :  Cling  to  the  bishop ; 
he  is  the  living  unity  of  the  church.  This  is  a  plain 
counsel,  easy  to  understand,  and  hard  to  gainsay.  It  is 
not  for  Christians  individually  to  decide  upon  the  claims 
of  rival  teachings;  that  is  the  business  of  the  bishop.  It 
is  he  who  teaches  the  true  doctrine,  enforces  wholesome 
discipline,  directs  the  true  Christian  worship,  and  the 
first  duty  of  the  soldier,  Ignatius  tells  his  readers,  is  to 
follow  his  commanding  officer  without  question.  The 
orthodoxy  of  the  Pastorals  has  led  by  a  short  path  to 
the  episcopalism  of  Ignatius.  It  is  advocated  with  all  the 
ardor  of  his  soul  and  an  extravagance  of  language  all  his 
own: 

Let  nothing  be  done  without  the  bishop ;  so  you  shall  do  all 
in  security.  .  .  .  Whatever  the  bishop  approves  of,  that  is 
pleasing  to  God.  Hold  to  the  bishop  that  God  may  hold  to 
you.  ...  To  do  anything  without  the  bishop  is  to  serve  the 
devil.  ...  To  obey  the  bishop  is  to  obey  the  Father  of  Jesus 
Christ,  the  universal  Bishop.  .  .  .  Bishops  are  in  the  counsels 
of  Jesus  Christ,  therefore  one  must  conform  to  the  counsel 
of  his  bishop.  ...  Ye  are  subject  to  the  bishop  as  to  Jesus 
Christ.  .  .  .  Reverence  the  bishop  as  the  Lord  himself. 

The  next  age  saw  this  episcopal  supremacy  an  estab- 
lished fact.  The  first  duty  of  the  Christian  was  obedience 
to  the  bishop ;  that  is,  the  individual  was  completely  sub- 
jected to  a  hierarchy,  and  with  this,  as  Wernle  says,  "we 
have  gone  back  again  to  where  Jesus  began."  The 
Letter  to  Polycarp  forms  a  counterpart  to  those  sent 


Catholicism  345 

to  the  churches,  and  in  place  of  exhortations  to  the  faithful 
we  have  counsels  addressed  to  the  bishop.  Poly  carp  is 
urged  to  show  an  equal  concern  for  spiritual  as  for  material 
things,  for  Ignatius  holds  that  the  bishop  has  taken  on  the 
special  function  of  the  presbyters,  the  cure  of  souls,  and 
become  a  moral  counsellor,  a  director  of  conscience, — 
a  step  that  followed  naturally  from  his  position  as  guardian 
of  discipline  and  oracle  of  doctrinal  truth.  There  also 
appears  a  principle,  to  be  established  after  long  conflict, 
when  Ignatius  lays  it  down  that  the  bishop  is  possessor 
par  excellence  of  the  spirit  of  God  and  Christ,  and  the 
grace  bestowed  upon  him  in  his  official  capacity  is  some- 
thing of  a  higher  order  than  any  inspiration  or  spiritual 
gifts  of  individuals. 

The  picture  of  the  Ignatian  bishop  in  these  Letters  seems 
overcoloured  and  out  of  keeping  with  their  early  date, 
yet  they  contain  admissions  which  show  that  church 
government  as  Ignatius  conceives  it  is  far  from  being  an 
episcopal  autocracy.  The  claims  he  urges  for  episcopal 
supremacy  are  not  so  much  claims  for  the  bishop  personally 
as  for  the  ecclesiastical  authority  of  which  the  bishop  is  the 
representative.  Thus  the  exercise  of  discipline  is  not  a 
personal  power.  Heretics  are  (to  be  treated  as)  wild 
beasts,  but  it  is  not  said  that  the  bishop  can  expel  them 
of  his  own  authority;  he  is  not  yet  in  possession  of  the 
means  of  action  which  absolutism  requires.  For  another 
thing,  we  do  not  find  that  presbyters  are  eliminated 
from  the  government  of  the  church.  The  Presbyterial 
College  is  compared  with  the  Council  of  the  Apostles,  and  if 
presbyters  ought  to  give  an  example  of  submission  to  the 
bishop  by  subordinating  their  preferences  to  his,  that  is  not 
the  obedience  of  inferior  to  superior,  but  the  preservation 
of  the  close  accord  that  should  subsist  between  the 
Council  of  the  church  and  its  executive  head.  Nor  is  the 
community  without  a  voice  in  its  affairs,  and  among  them 


346  Catholicism 

the  election  of  the  bishop.  These  Letters  of  Ignatius 
are  addressed  to  the  churches,  not  to  their  bishops,  and 
the  brethren  who  meet  him  on  his  arrival  at  Smyrna  are 
delegates  sent  by  their  respective  communities.  Further- 
more, in  weighing  the  testimony  of  the  Ignatian  Epistles 
to  the  condition  of  the  Asiatic  churches  at  this  time  we 
must  not  lose  sight  of  the  temperament  of  the  writer. 
Ardent  and  impassioned,  Ignatius  sees  things  through 
his  imagination,  as  he  would  have  them  to  be  rather 
than  as  they  really  are.  The  same  enthusiasm  that 
prompts  his  eager  aspiration  to  martyrdom  inspires  the 
exaltation  of  episcopal  power  which  has  become  for  him 
the  one  thing  needful ;  and  the  circumstances  under  which 
the  Letters  were  written,  their  unmeasured  language, 
do  not  allow  us  to  accept  them  as  depicting  the  reality 
of  the  existing  church  organisation.  If  Ignatius  insists 
so  violently  on  the  bishop's  supremacy,  it  is  because  it  is 
not  yet  a  fact.  If  he  takes  such  pains  to  persuade  his 
readers  that  complete  submission  to  the  bishop  is  the 
only  way  of  salvation,  it  is  plain  that  they  are  not  convinced 
of  that  truth  nor  aware  of  their  duty.  One  does  not  beat 
so  loud  upon  open  doors. 

It  is  important  for  the  date  and  genuineness  of  the 
Ignatian  Letters  that  the  episcopate  they  treat  of  is  a 
purely  local  office  and  confers  no  authority  upon  its 
possessor  outside  of  his  own  community.  The  churches 
they  address  are  autonomous  communities;  Christ  is  the 
universal  Bishop  and  each  local  bishop  His  agent  or  organ. 
The  Catholic  Church  is  still  a  unity  spiritual  and  invisible, 
as  in  the  mind  of  Paul,  and  the  Catholic  Episcopate  which 
a  later  time  was  to  make  a  reality  far  exceeding  the  ideal 
of  Ignatius  lies  quite  beyond  the  horizon  of  his  vision. 
While  he  accumulates  all  the  arguments  that  make 
episcopal  power  the  anchor  of  safety  for  Christians,  he 
breathes  no  word  of  Catholic  authority,  or  sacramental 


Catholicism  347 

prerogative,  or  the  apostolic  institution  of  the  episcopate, 
or  the  theory  of  Apostolic  Succession.  Obviously  it  is 
because  he  is  ignorant  of  these  developments  that  he 
does  not  speak  of  them. 

We  are  led  to  conclude  from  these  Letters  that  they 
present  to  us  much  that  is  theoretical  rather  than  actual, 
but  this  first  manifesto  in  favor  of  the  monarchical 
episcopacy  that  was  in  a  state  of  becoming  opens  a  new 
chapter  in  church  history,  the  record  of  the  struggle  of 
that  institution  to  establish  itself  in  the  other  regions  of 
Christendom  and  to  overcome  the  resistance  which  the  old 
Christian  spirit  of  liberty,  of  individual  inspiration,  of 
direct  communion  with  the  Divine,  opposed  to  the  tyranny 
of  ecclesiastical  authority  over  the  Christian's  thought 
and  life.  The  constitutive  principle  and  the  essential 
machinery  of  the  later  Episcopal  domination  already 
existed  at  the  opening  of  the  second  century  in  those 
regions  of  which  Mommsen  writes:  "Asia  Minor  was 
an  old  land  of  subjection,  accustomed  to  a  despotic  regime 
alike  under  Greek  and  Persian  overlords."  But,  as  I  have 
said,  it  was  when  transplanted  to  Rome,  to  that  incom- 
parable school  in  the  art  of  governing  men  whence  the 
Catholic  Church  drew  the  guiding  principles  of  its  organisa- 
tion, that  the  monarchical  episcopate  became  an  over- 
shadowing power. 

It  seemed  desirable  to  sketch  in  some  detail  the  initial 
stages  of  the  movement  that  led  from  the  theocratic 
democracy  of  the  primitive  Christian  communities  to  the 
hierarchical  constitution  of  the  Catholic  Church;  but  its 
after  development  need  not  be  closely  followed.  To  vary 
the  saying,  it  is  the  first  step  that  counts.  The  seed 
has  been  sown  and  the  plant  already  shows  itself  above 
the  ground;  only  time  is  needed  to  bring  it  to  maturity. 

That  the  bishop  had  charge  of  the  worship  of  the  church 


348  Catholicism 

and  above  all  presided  at  the  Lord's  Supper  had  much  to 
do  with  his  elevation  above  the  presbyters.  In  the  early 
time  while  the  Eucharist  was  still  an  Agape,  or  evening 
meal  in  commemoration  of  the  last  supper  of  Jesus  and  his 
disciples,  the  congregation  sat  down  at  the  table  and  one 
presided  who  offered  the  eucharistic  prayer.  When  the 
participants  grew  too  large  in  number  for  all  to  be  seated 
at  a  common  table,  sitting  became  a  mark  of  honor;  the 
"laity"  had  to  stand,  while  the  presbyters  were  invited 
to  sit  with  the  bishop  at  his  table.  Thus  a  picture  or 
dramatisation  of  the  last  supper  was  offered  to  the  imagi- 
nation, the  bishop  symbolising  Christ  and  the  Presbyters 
on  either  side  the  Apostles.  Probably  this  picture  was 
in  the  mind  of  Ignatius  when  he  assigned  the  place  of 
Christ  to  the  bishop  and  that  of  the  Apostles  to  the 
Presbyters.  In  Alexandria  the  reproduction  was  the 
more  exact  since  there  were  just  twelve  Presbyters  in 
that  church  down  to  the  middle  of  the  third  century. 
As  time  advanced  it  brought  further  changes.  The 
Eucharist  was  separated  from  the  Agape,  with  which  it 
had  been  identified,  and  its  celebration  was  transferred 
from  the  evening  to  the  morning.  As  a  distinct  rite  it 
gained  a  new  solemnity  and  a  higher  place  in  men's 
reverence,  and  with  the  advent  of  the  sacramental  idea 
the  ascendancy  of  the  bishop,  its  celebrant,  grew  more 
pronounced.1  At  the  same  time  the  public  worship  of 
the  assembly,  which  at  first  had  been  open  to  all  who  would 
take  part  in  it,  was  becoming  settled  in  a  fixed  form  and 
conducted  by  the  bishop,  upon  whom  the  service  of  the 
Word  especially  devolved.  And  this  from  the  necessity 
of  doctrinal  uniformity  which  more  than  all  else  brought 
about  the  supremacy  of  the  bishop  in  the  West  as  in  the 
East.  By  the  middle  of  the  second  century  Gnosticism 
had  become  a  formidable  menace  to  the  faith  of  the  Church 
1  Allen,  Christian  Institutions,  82-84. 


Catholicism  349 

and  it  claimed  the  authorisation  of  Scripture — that  is, 
of  writings  that  passed  under  the  name  of  the  Twelve 
Apostles  to  whom  the  mysteries  of  the  faith  had  been 
confided  by  the  Master.  The  Church  accepted  the 
principle  of  apostolic  authority  and  its  restricted  applica- 
tion, and  so  the  first  order  of  spiritual  leaders  in  Paul's 
enumeration — apostles,  prophets,  teachers — passed  away. 
With  one  exception  the  greater  apostolate  was  ignored  or 
forgotten,  and  the  founding  of  all  the  churches  and  their 
instruction  in  the  faith  were  attributed  to  the  Twelve 
and  their  coadjutor,  St.  Paul.  Upon  this  assumed  fact 
the  Church  took  its  stand,  and  henceforth  the  authority 
of  the  Apostles  as  divine  and  infallible  grew  stronger  in 
the  Christian  imagination.  But  amidst  the  voluminous 
letters  in  circulation  what  were  the  authentic  apostolic 
writings  to  which  appeal  must  be  made,  and  how  deter- 
mine their  true  significance  while  the  current  free  and  easy 
methods  of  interpretation  could  make  Scripture  witness 
to  any  wildest  theosophic  speculation?  Search  for  an 
answer  to  these  vital  questions  led  to  the  further  aggrand- 
izement of  the  episcopal  office.  The  bishop  in  each  com- 
munity was  looked  to  as  the  voucher  for  the  apostolic 
tradition,  and  for  the  genuineness  of  apostolic  writings. 
The  Apostles  must  have  provided  for  the  preservation 
of  their  teachings,  and  to  this  end  it  was  plain  that  they 
had  appointed  a  bishop  in  every  church  they  planted  to 
receive  their  instructions  and  transmit  them  to  his 
successor.1  Thus  the  short  summaries  of  belief,  the 
defence  of  the  Church  against  gnostic  error,  were  traced 
to  an  apostolic  origin  and  invested  with  divine  authority. 

1  "How  inevitable  was  the  thought  of  succession  in  connection  with  a 
deposit  of  doctrine  is  shown  by  the  Pastoral  Epistles — e.g.  II  Tim.  ii,  2  . .  . 
and  the  fact  that  very  soon  it  was  applied  exclusively  to  the  bishops  is 
only  a  special  case  in  the  general  development  of  the  episcopate  which 
vanquishes  all  other  rivals."  Harnack,  Constitution  and  the  Law  of  the 
Church  in  the  First  Two  Centuries,  123-124. 


350  Catholicism 

There  was  no  need  of  historical  research  into  the  Christian 
past,  nor  of  scholarship  to  examine  its  literature:  "What 
was  needed  was  one  trustworthy  man  in  each  community 
of  Christians  who  could  certify  that  the  faith,  as  incorpo- 
rated in  some  form  of  sound  words,  had  been  received  by 
him  from  his  predecessor  in  office."1  This  man  displaced 
the  ancient  presbyter.  Originally  the  presbyters  were  re- 
garded as  the  conservators  and  transmitters  of  apostolic 
tradition,  and  we  learn  from  a  well-known  passage  that 
Papias,  who  lived  until  about  160,  still  resorted  to  pres- 
byters as  the  highest  source  of  information  concerning  the 
primitive  faith.  For  the  elders  he  consulted  gave  heart 
and  mind  to  their  task,  held  anxious  communion  with  one 
another  and  with  survivors  of  an  earlier  generation,  and 
treasured  in  memory  the  sayings  and  doings,  the  facts  and 
teachings  which  had  come  down  from  the  beginning.  But 
if  the  early  witnesses  to  the  tradition  could  speak  with 
authority,  testimony  at  third  or  fourth  hand  carried  less 
weight,  and  their  declining  prestige  left  the  presbyters 
powerless  to  withstand  the  transference  of  their  distinctive 
function  to  the  omnivorous  bishop.  With  this  the  de- 
liverance of  religious  truth,  no  longer  dependent  upon 
what  we  may  call  the  religious  qualifications  of  the  wit- 
ness (as  Irenaeus'  fine  letter  to  Florinus  intimates),  be- 
came the  official  act  of  an  administrator  of  ecclesiastical 
affairs. 

Irenaeus,  who  began  by  asserting  that  Christian  truth 
was  to  be  ascertained  and  verified  through  the  tradition  of 
the  presbyters,  was  led  finally  to  insist  upon  the  episcopate 
as  defender  of  the  faith  and  the  bulwark  of  the  Church 
against  the  false  teachings  of  the  Gnostics.  He  gives  us 
the  first  definite  statement  of  the  doctrine  of  Apostolic 
Succession.2  The  standard  of  Christian  doctrine,  he 

1  Allen,  op.  cit.,  90. 

a  It  was  a  tenet  of  the  Jewish  doctors  that  a  succession  of  Rabbis  from 


Catholicism  351 

maintained,  was  the  common  belief  of  the  Christian 
churches,  in  all  essentials  the  same,  and  this  was  the  belief 
taught  by  the  Apostles.  To  this  Catholic  and  Apostolic 
Faith  all  theological  opinions  were  to  be  referred,  and  such 
as  did  not  conform  to  it  were  thereby  discredited  and 
shown  to  be  "heretical, "  or  merely  the  arbitrary  opinions 
of  a  sect.  The  custodians  of  this  faith  were  the  bishops 
of  the  several  churches  to  whom  it  had  been  transmitted 
through  a  chain  of  succession  from  the  Apostles  them- 
selves. The  latter  Irenaeus  compares  to  men  who  have 
deposited  money  for  charitable  purposes  in  a  bank  of 
which  the  bishop  is  cashier.  The  Apostles,  that  is,  had 
carefully  instructed  their  successors,  the  bishops  they 
appointed,  and  these  in  turn  had  passed  on  to  their 
successors  the  teaching  they  had  received.  This,  we 
may  note,  was  to  overlook  the  fact  that  in  the  view  of  the 
first  Christians  the  Apostles  were  not  to  have  any  succes- 
sors, for  the  simple  reason  that  the  day  of  the  Lord  was 
near  and  the  end  of  all  things  was  at  hand.  Irenaeus 
tells  us  that  since  it  would  be  very  tedious  to  reckon  up 
the  succession  in  all  the  churches  it  will  be  enough  for 
him  to  trace  the  one  that  is  to  be  found  in  the  church 
which  holds  "pre-eminent  authority."  So  then,  Peter 
and  Paul,  having  founded  and  organised  the  church  of 
Rome,  appointed  one  Linus  their  successor  and  gave  into 
his  hands  the  office  of  the  episcopate,  which  came  next  to 
Anacletus  and  after  him  to  Clement,  and  so  through  the 
succession  of  bishops  the  apostolic  faith  has  come  down 
to  the  time  of  Irenaeus. 

Tertullian  somewhat  later  further  expounds  the  new 
doctrine.  In  obedience  to  the  command  of  the  risen 
Christ  who  sent  them  to  teach  and  to  baptise  all  nations, 

Moses  down  had  handed  on  through  the  generations  the  deposit  of  revealed 
truth,  and  consciously  or  unconsciously  the  Church  adapted  this  theory 
to  its  own  use. 


352  Catholicism 

the  Twelve  went  forth  into  the  world  and  founded  churches 
in  every  city,  from  which  all  other  churches  have  derived 
the  tradition  of  the  faith.  The  registers  of  the  apostolic 
churches  show  that  their  first  bishop  had  for  his  predecessor 
some  one  of  the  Apostles.  Thus  the  church  of  Rome 
records  that  Clement  was  ordained  by  Peter  to  receive 
and  transmit  the  true  faith.  We  note  that  this  account 
of  the  Roman  succession  differs  from  that  of  Irenaeus, 
but  since  both  are  equally  groundless  the  difference 
is  not  important.  There  is  abundant  evidence  to  the 
fact  that  the  single  bishop  did  not  arrive  in  the  church  of 
Rome  until  after  the  year  115;  it  is  highly  improbable 
that  Peter  ever  set  foot  in  the  imperial  city,  and  Paul  wrote 
his  Letter  to  an  existing  Roman  church  which  he  had  never 
seen.  If  facts  could  have  asserted  themselves  against 
the  advocates  of  the  principle  of  apostolicity  it  would 
have  been  awkward  for  the  pretensions  of  the  ecclesia 
urbis  that  in  the  restricted  application  now  given  to  the 
term  apostolic  it  was  not  an  apostolic  foundation  at  all. 
As  it  was,  nothing  could  be  neater  and  completer  than  this 
theoretical  construction  of  episcopal  succession  from  the 
Twelve  Apostles  with  facts  ready  made  to  suit. 

As  guardian  of  the  faith  the  bishop  now  assumed 
complete  control  of  the  teaching  office.  The  charisma 
veritatis  which  according  to  St.  Paul  belonged  to  all 
Christians  who  were  filled  with  the  Spirit,  became  exclu- 
sively his  endowment,  and  when  no  one  was  allowed  to 
speak  to  the  congregation  except  by  his  permission  the 
ancient  freedom  of  all  to  participate  in  the  "service  of  the 
word"  was  at  an  end.  The  people  were  taught  that  they 
had  no  right  to  opinions  of  their  own — something  incom- 
patible with  the  obtuse  intellectual  condition  required 
for  the  purposes  of  hierarchical  absolutism;  they  were  to 
avoid  "vain  babblings"  and  confine  themselves  to  "walk- 
ing worthily,"  lest  they  come  to  adopt  ideas  at  variance 


Catholicism  353 

with  the  teaching  of  the  Church.  From  its  origin  the 
episcopate  showed  itself  the  adversary  of  free  thought, 
and  unity  of  belief  was  secured  by  the  simple  method  of 
suppressing  all  dissidents,  who  were  violently  accused 
of  all  manner  of  immorality. 

And  as  the  gnostic  controversy  had  invested  the 
successor  of  the  Apostles  with  the  prerogative  of  the 
Teacher  of  old  days,  so  the  Montanist  reaction  conferred 
on  him  the  inspiration  of  the  Prophet,  and  with  the  pass- 
ing of  this  second  order  of  spiritual  leaders  of  the  early 
Church,  once  held  in  the  highest  honor,  the  bishop  now 
took  over  the  functions  of  all  the  three.  The  spiritual 
office  of  prophecy,  which  from  its  liability  to  extravagance 
had  given  Paul  some  trouble,  was  more  and  more  felt  to 
be  an  inconvenience  as  time  went  on.  The  prophets  were 
looked  upon  as  a  disturbing  element  by  the  church  authori- 
ties who  labored  to  promote  unity  in  the  congregation 
and  the  orderly  conduct  of  affairs,  and  that  they  were 
becoming  fewer  and  less  influential  was  not  unpleasing 
to  the  bishop  who  was  naturally  conservative  and  whose 
first  care  as  head  of  the  community  was  the  welfare  of  the 
whole,  not  the  irregular  aspirations  of  a  few.  It  lay  in  the 
nature  of  his  office  that  the  church  tended  to  become 
a  corporate  institution  with  individual  life  merged  in  the 
general  life  and  individual  interests  subordinated  or 
suppressed.  Then  too  the  prophet  was  likely  to  make 
trouble  for  the  church  in  its  relation  to  the  pagan  neighbor- 
hood. The  inspired  enthusiasm  which  found  vent  in  the 
condemnation  of  evil  practices,  or  the  bold  utterance  of 
unpalatable  truths,  was  far  from  helpful  to  the  church 
officials  who  were  striving  to  conciliate  the  opposition 
and  gain  the  good  will  of  the  people  among  whom  they 
dwelt.  To  this  end  it  was  requisite  that  the  bishop  should 
be  persona  grata  to  them  that  were  without ;  not  a  radical 
doctrinaire,  but  a  sagacious  opportunist  able  to  commend 

23 


354  Catholicism 

the  faith  to  all  classes  with  sympathetic  persuasiveness, 
and  by  methods  of  adaptation  and  assimilation  to  further 
the  growth  of  the  Christian  Church  in  the  world. 

Montanism,  which  originated  in  Phrygia,  the  old  land 
of  the  "possessed, "  was  a  wide-spread  movement  to  revive 
the  spirit  of  prophecy  in  protest  against  the  ecclesiastical 
secularism  and  the  neglect  of  the  true  Christian  aim,  the 
religious  edification  of  the  individual  soul.  The  Mon- 
tanists  would  make  no  terms  with  the  world;  they  would 
keep  the  Church  pure  even  if  that  were  to  keep  it  small; 
and  within  the  Church  they  claimed  the  freedom  of  the 
human  spirit  and  its  right  to  the  fullest  development,  its 
open  vision  of  divine  truth  through  immediate  communion 
with  the  Spirit  of  God,  its  only  guide  and  stay.  It  was 
this  that  appealed  to  the  soul  of  Tertullian  and  led  that 
champion  of  Catholicity  to  join  the  ranks  of  the  Montanists. 
What  they  sought  was  a  return  to  the  faith  and  feeling 
of  the  early  Church,  and  their  views  of  the  religious  life 
could  only  seem  an  extravagant  novelty  to  those  who  had 
travelled  far  from  the  ancient  ways.  None  the  less  their 
exaltation  of  sentiment  was  no  more  compatible  with  the 
conventional  moderation  and  ordered  rule  essential  to  the 
hierarchy  than  was  the  unbridled  speculation  of  the 
Gnostics,  nor  could  the  independent  appropriation  of 
special  gifts  by  individual  laymen  be  allowed  by  an 
ecclesiastical  organisation  claiming  spiritual  authority 
in  its  corporate  capacity  alone. 

Montanism  raised  the  issue  between  the  religion  of  the 
spirit  and  the  religion  of  authority — to  use  Sabatier's 
phrase, — which  is  still  a  living  issue  in  our  time.  "It 
was  a  beating  of  the  wings  of  pietism  against  the  iron 
bars  of  organisation.  It  was  the  first,  though  not  the 
last,  rebellion  of  the  religious  sentiment  against  official 
religion."1  But  even  if  these  recalcitrants  had  not  been 
1  Hatch,  The  Organisation  of  the  early  Christian  Churches,  125. 


Catholicism  355 

hampered  by  their  primitive  conception  of  prophecy  as  a 
divine  possession,  they  could  not  have  made  head  against 
the  tidal  movement  which  was  making  for  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Catholic  Church,  as  it  was  now  beginning 
to  be  called.  Nevertheless,  whether  they  would  regard 
it  as  a  moral  victory  or  an  added  mortification,  the  clever 
ecclesiastics  paid  them  the  ironical  compliment  of  ''steal- 
ing their  thunder."  That  inspiration  by  the  Holy  Ghost 
which  Montanism  claimed  for  the  prophet  the  Church 
appropriated  as  the  special  perquisite  of  the  episcopate. 
It  met  the  revolt  of  prophetic  enthusiasm  by  proclaiming 
every  bishop  to  be  a  prophet.  In  the  older  view  the  gift 
of  the  Spirit  was  the  pre-condition  that  qualified  one  for 
appointment  to  the  ministry  and  witnessed  to  his  divine 
call.  Now  it  was  held  that  the  gift  attached  to  the 
office  and  was  received  by  the  bishop  at  his  ordination. 
The  original  Christian  inspiration  was  quenched  or 
swallowed  up  in  the  episcopate.  The  Holy  Spirit  was  not 
present  and  active  in  the  congregation  at  large ;  inspiration 
was  not  given  to  every  follower  of  Christ  with  the  freedom 
of  the  wind  that  bloweth  where  it  listeth;  it  was  the 
prerogative  of  the  bishop  alone.  Tied  to  an  ecclesiastical 
office,  and  obedient  to  the  magical  mechanism  of  a  formal 
rite,  it  passed  by  physical  contact  in  the  laying  on  of 
hands.  And  what  the  bishop  received  he  had  the  power 
to  bestow:  "through  him  exclusively  did  it  please  the 
Holy  Spirit  to  enter  into  the  souls  of  individuals  at  con- 
firmation or  of  church  officers  at  ordination."1  This 
matter  of  ordination,  however,  was  later  on  to  become  a 
burning  question,  when  as  the  ministry  was  changing 
to  a  priesthood  it  came  to  be  regarded  as  the  authorisation 
to  conduct  the  ritual. 

About  the  middle  of  the  second  century  we  find  estab- 

1  Hatch,  op.  cit.,  108.     For  some  evils  resulting  from  the  suppression 
of  Montanism  see  Allen,  Christian  Institutions,  104-105. 


356  Catholicism 

lished  in  all  the  churches  a  central  government  under  a 
single  chief.  Referring  to  this  period  Harnack  writes: 
"It  is  superfluous  and  indeed  impossible  to  enumerate 
the  rights  and  powers  of  the  bishop,  since  in  a  sense  they 
are  limitless."  As  yet  however  this  omnipotent  bishop 
was  only  the  head  of  a  local  church,  but  when  in  the 
greater  cities  the  single  community  was  becoming  incon- 
veniently numerous  and  the  adjacent  rural  districts  becom- 
ing crowded  with  sheep  having  no  shepherd,  the  needs 
of  the  occasion  were  met  by  detaching  presbyters  from  the 
bishop's  council  to  form  new  congregations  and  take 
charge  of  them  as  delegates  of  the  bishop  and  in  subordina- 
tion to  his  authority.  In  this  way  the  movement  started 
whereby  in  course  of  time  the  congregational  system  of 
autonomous  churches  gave  place  to  the  diocesan  system 
in  which  all  the  churches  of  a  given  district  were  subject 
to  the  rule  of  a  single  bishop.  The  change  was  not  made 
all  at  once,  however,  and  in  smaller  places  the  bishop  re- 
tained his  original  position.  The  new  system  effected  an 
interchange  of  original  functions :  as  the  bishop  had  taken 
over  that  of  the  presbyter  in  becoming  trustee  of  the 
tradition,  so  now  to  the  presbyter  is  given  the  conduct 
of  worship  and  the  power  to  celebrate  the  Eucharist  which 
had  belonged  to  the  bishop  alone.  This  was  the  first 
step  on  the  road  by  which  the  presbyter  passed  into  the 
priest.  As  pastor  of  a  local  church  the  presbyter  stood 
in  the  place  of  the  earlier  bishop,  and  he  was  disposed  to 
magnify  his  office.  For  a  generation  the  peace  of  the 
Church  was  disturbed  by  the  rivalries  and  contentions 
between  presbyters  claiming  independence  and  bishops 
insisting  on  their  subjection. 

The  champion  of  episcopal  prerogative  was  Cyprian 
of  Carthage,  "the  embodiment  of  the  Roman  genius  of 
administration, ' '  as  he  has  been  called.  To  such  a  mind  the 
principles  of  Church  order  were  plain  and  indisputable. 


Catholicism  357 

Christ's  God-given  authority  he  had  committed  to  the 
Apostles  and  they  in  turn  to  the  bishops  in  succession. 
Any  authority  of  presbyters  to  minister  in  the  Church  they 
must  derive  from  its  only  source,  the  episcopate.  This 
seems  conclusive.  And  it  goes  without  saying  that  the 
congregation  has  no  power  to  appoint  its  officers;  its  part 
is  limited  to  expressing  approval  of  the  appointment. 
Cyprian  also  lays  down  the  rule  for  the  ordination  of  a 
bishop  which  became  prevalent  in  the  Catholic  Church. 
It  is  the  practice,  he  says,  "delivered  from  divine  tradi- 
tion and  apostolic  observance, "  that  all  the  bishops  of  the 
province  should  assemble  to  ordain  the  new  minister  of 
their  order  in  the  presence  of  the  people  given  to  his 
charge.  This  is  the  only  valid  ordination,  because  the 
bishop's  office  must  come  to  him  from  those  who  hold  it 
and  have  power  to  confer  it — those  to  whom  it  has  been 
transmitted  through  the  succession  of  bishops  from  the 
Apostles  who  received  it  from  Christ.  In  ordaining  a 
presbyter,  on  the  other  hand,  the  bishops  do  not  transmit 
the  whole  of  their  authority,  but  only  enough  for  the 
purpose  of  his  office.  The  presbyter  is  given  the  right  to 
perform  certain  specified  ecclesiastical  acts  and  no  others. 
Thus  a  presbyter  cannot  ordain  a  presbyter,  because  the 
power  of  ordination  is  one  of  the  reserved  powers  of  the 
episcopate.  So  then  the  ministry  is  no  longer  represen- 
tative of  the  people,  but  its  authority  is  derived  from  a 
source  beyond  and  above  them.  The  bishop  holds  his 
office  by  divine  right,  and  no  longer  in  virtue  of  a  divine 
call  evidenced  by  practical  results  and  ratified  by  the 
congregation.  He  is  appointed  by  God  and  responsible 
only  to  God.  And  his  unlimited  power  over  his  helpless 
flock  appears  in  his  claim  of  the  divine  right  of  doing 
wrong  when  early  in  the  third  century  Callistus  of  Rome 
declares  that  not  even  for  deadly  sin  might  a  community 
venture  to  remove  its  bishop.  Time  was  when  upon  his 


358  Catholicism 

commiting  sin  the  bishop's  tenure  of  office  would  have 
lapsed  of  itself,  for  the  chief  witness  to  his  call  to  the 
ministry  was  the  moral  character  shown  in  a  blameless 
life.  Now  his  office  is  sacrosanct;  his  personal  sins  are 
not  re  viewable  by  men,  nor  do  they  vitiate  his  service 
in  the  things  of  God.1  When  Cyprian  declared  "The 
Church  is  in  the  bishop,  and  if  one  is  not  with  the  bishop 
he  is  not  in  the  Church,"  the  contention  of  Ignatius 
that  bishops  are  the  visible  representatives  of  the  divine 
immanence  in  the  churches,  so  that  adhesion  to  the 
bishop  is  essential  to  being  a  Christian,  had  passed  from 
the  realm  of  theory  to  matter  of  fact,  and  the  bishop  could 
say  without  hyperbole,  L'Eglise  c'est  moi.  The  episco- 
pate was  not  the  roof  and  spire,  but  the  foundation  of 
the  edifice;  not  a  development  within  the  Church  to  meet 
certain  emergencies,  but  the  primary  condition  of  its 
existence,  ordained  from  the  beginning  by  the  divine  will. 

It  was  natural  that  bishops  in  the  greater  cities  of  the 
Empire,  such  as  Antioch,  Alexandria  and  above  all  in 
Rome,  should  assume  a  certain  pre-eminence  over  the 
bishops  of  smaller  churches  in  remote  localities  who  had 
not  acquired  diocesan  jurisdiction.  This  relative  impor- 
tance of  episcopal  sees  gave  rise  to  the  metropolitan,  the 
presiding  bishop  of  a  province,  who  exercised  a  control  over 
the  action  of  local  bishops.  And  as  the  upper  grades  of 
the  hierarchy  rose,  the  lower  fell.  A  little  later  it  was 
decreed  that  the  smaller  bishoprics  should  be  suppressed 
in  places  where  a  presbyter  could  serve  as  well,  in  order 
that  the  episcopal  dignity  should  not  be  held  cheap 
from  the  number  of  those  who  possessed  it.  This  dignified 
episcopate  now  acquires  solidarity  and  appears  as  a 
self -perpetuating  corporation,  controlling  all  ecclesiastical 
affairs  as  well  as  those  of  a  local  church.  With  the 
substitution  of  bishops  for  communities  everywhere 

1  Moore,  op.  cit.,  252-254. 


Catholicism  359 

complete,  the  Cyprianic  doctrine  that  the  body  of  bishops 
constitutes  the  Church  appears  as  a  necessary  conse- 
quence, and  henceforth  the  unity  of  the  Church  consists 
in  the  unanimity  of  the  bishops.  They  act  together  in 
Councils  from  which  presbyters  and  deacons  as  well  as 
the  laity  are  excluded,  and  since  the  gift  of  the  Holy  Spirit 
is  their  exclusive  possession  their  decisions  carry  the 
weight  of  divine  revelation.1 

And  so  the  Christian  universalism,  which  meant  in  St. 
Paul's  preaching  a  religion  free  to  all,  was  made  by  the 
Catholic  Church  to  signify  a  dominion  binding  upon  all. 
That  the  Pauline  churches  remained  without  any  organi- 
sation under  official  authorities  and  their  only  government 
was  that  of  the  spirit  was  mainly  owing  to  the  sentiment 
that  all  Christians  belonged  to  the  Church  as  a  whole 
whose  sovereign  ruler  was  the  Lord  Christ,  and  that  the 
local  assembly  was  but  a  partial  embodiment  or  manifesta- 
tion of  the  One  Church.  This  body  of  Christ,  animated 
by  his  Spirit,  was  not  a  corporation;  it  was  an  ideal 
Christian  unity,  not  an  ecclesiastical  institution.  This 
seems  the  only  conception  of  the  Church  that  accords 
with  the  principles  of  Jesus.  When  the  theory  of  Cle- 
ment carried  back  the  gradually  developed  order  of  the 
local  communities  to  an  Old  Testament  prototype  and  an 
apostolic  institution,  then  the  individual  churches  began 
as  it  were  to  set  up  for  themselves.  Each  church  which 
hitherto  had  felt  itself  organically  one  with  the  greater 
Church,  the  whole  Brotherhood  in  Christ  throughout  the 

1  Allen,  op.  tit.,  129.  "If  instead  of  wrangling  over  disputed  questions 
about  which  we  can  know  nothing  and  of  which  it  would  not  profit  us  to 
know  everything,  ecumenical  councils  had  preached  liberty  in  non- 
essentials;  had  rebuked  the  contentious  spirit  of  theology;  had  recalled 
men  to  the  simple  revelation  of  the  Gospel;  had  proclaimed  crusades  against 
sensuality,  dishonesty,  cruelty,  oppression;  had  striven  to  purify  and 
develop  the  Christian  ideal  of  character,  the  face  of  the  world  today  would 
be  very  different  from  what  it  is."  Tyrrell,  Medievalism,  75. 


360  Catholicism 

world,  now  became  a  separate,  independent,  self-contained 
entity  with  a  legally  constituted  organisation  and  a 
centralised  episcopal  government.  The  Ignatian  doctrine 
that  the  bishop  is  the  analogue  of  Christ,  the  Head  of  the 
Church  universal,  is  an  assertion  of  this  autonomous 
individuality  whose  independence  was  at  its  greatest 
about  the  year  150.  From  that  time  the  course  of  the 
hierarchical  development  led  to  the  aggregation  of  these 
individual  communities  and  their  subordination  under  the 
diocesan,  provincial  and  patriarchal  constitution  of  the 
Catholic  Church  as  it  passed  successively  under  conciliar, 
imperial  and  papal  rule.  This  universal  Church,  a  posi- 
tive reality  very  earthly  and  not  a  little  sensual  and 
devilish,  was  something  widely  different  from  that  spiritual 
unity  of  the  faithful,  the  Church  of  God  as  it  lived  in  the 
primitive  conception.  This  latter  is  the  holy  Catholic 
Church  to  which  the  Creed  refers,  a  kingdom  that  "cometh 
not  with  observation."  That  there  exists  in  the  world  a 
holy  people  who  lead  a  life  with  God  is  something  that  can 
only  be  believed  and  cannot  be  seen ;  on  the  other  hand,  a 
conspicuous  institution  organised  under  official  authority 
is  easily  visible  and  cannot  be  an  object  of  faith. 

The  essence  of  Catholicism  lies  in  the  refusal  to  make  any 
distinction  between  the  Church  in  the  religious  sense  and 
the  Church  in  the  legal  sense.  The  government  of  the  legal 
Church  is  the  government  of  Christ,  and  the  life  of  Christians 
with  God  is  therefore  to  be  regulated  by  the  Catholic  ecclesi- 
astical law.  From  this  all  the  rest  follows.  .  .  .  The  rise  of 
ecclesiastical  law  and  the  constitution  of  the  Church  are  an 
apostasy  from  the  conditions  intended  by  Jesus  himself  and 
at  first  realised  in  the  primitive  Christian  communities.1 

It  has  been  said  that  the  Church  is  not  sufficiently 
described  as  the  invisible  body  of  Christ,  for  it  is  an  es- 
1 R.  Sohm,  The  Nature  and  Origin  of  Catholicism. 


Catholicism  361 

sential  part  of  its  nature  that  it  should  take  the  form  of  a 
society,  a  social  life.  The  social  and  corporate  element 
cannot  be  sundered  from  the  conception  of  the  Church. 
And  the  public  life  of  a  visible  society  of  men  cannot 
dispense  with  some  kind  of  form.  There  is  need  of  some 
generally  received  order,  which  arising  in  the  past  controls 
the  present,  so  that  in  case  of  divergencies  within  the 
society  the  fact  of  agreement  with  this  traditional  order 
decides  the  issue.  This  seems  to  ignore  the  fact  that 
society,  social  life,  and  public  law  already  exist.  Human 
life  is  a  life  of  social  relations.  The  Gospel  does  not  call 
men  into  a  special  society  ruled  by  special  law;  it  reveals 
the  principles  that  should  guide  the  daily  life  of  the 
world,  principles  of  personal  and  social  living  based  on 
men's  relation  to  God  and  their  relations  to  one  another 
as  involved  in  the  common  relation  to  God.  Jesus  would 
make  religion  one  with  life.  He  would  show  men  how  to 
live  the  common  life  in  love  and  joy,  in  trustful  dependence 
on  the  All-Father.  And  this  was  shown  them  in  the  life 
he  lived  himself,  and  the  witnesses  went  forth  to  spread 
abroad  the  knowledge  of  that  life  and  the  practice  of  it. 
It  does  not  appear  that  Jesus  saw  the  need  of  a  separate 
society  of  men  exclusively  devoted  to  religion  over  against 
the  irreligious  world  outside  their  society. 

To  return :  the  Cyprianic  idea  of  the  Church  implied  its 
independence  of  the  State,  and  the  attempt  to  found  an  im- 
perium  in  imperio  incited  severe  measures  on  the  part  of  the 
secular  power  for  the  suppression  of  the  Catholic  Church 
throughout  the  Empire.  But  the  failure  of  Decius  and  later 
of  Diocletian  to  stamp  out  Christianity  by  physical  force 
taught  Constantine  another  policy,  and  the  State  finally 
took  over  the  Church  it  could  not  subdue.1  One  result 

x"Ce  que  surtout  avait  se*duit  son  esprit  administratif  c'e*tait  cette 
constitution  Episcopate  qui  re"sumait  le  corps  immense  de  la  chr6tienite* 
dans  quelques  centaines  d'eVeques,  grouped  eux-memes  aut  our  de  cinq  ou 


362  Catholicism 

of  the  Decian  persecution  was  to  invest  the  bishops  with 
new  powers  of  discipline,  under  which  the  forgiveness  of 
sin  became  a  formal  judicial  function.  When  the  storm 
burst  upon  the  Church  many  unheroic  Christians  hastened 
to  seek  safety  in  the  profession  of  the  State  religion,  but 
after  it  subsided  the  ' 'Lapsed,"  as  they  were  called, 
desired  to  rejoin  their  churches,  and  Christian  charity 
showed  itself  eager  to  welcome  the  return  of  the  strayed 
sheep.  The  confessors  who  had  suffered  for  the  faith, 
exercising  the  old  prerogative  of  Christians  to  forgive  one 
another's  sins,  gave  them  certificates  of  absolution,  on  the 
strength  of  which  they  were  restored  to  good  standing. 
To  some  it  seemed  that  this  easy  indulgence  was  dissolv- 
ing moral  standards  in  a  flood  of  sentimentalism.  There 
were  others  who  perceived  that  a  universal  institution 
could  not  be  a  community  of  perfect  saints.  If  her  doors 
were  opened  to  all  men  her  moral  severity  must  relax, 
and  the  Church  be  likened  to  a  dragnet  which  gathers  of 
all  kinds,  good  and  bad.  The  issue  was  decided  by  resort 
to  the  familiar  method  of  meeting  difficulties.  The 
rule  was  adopted  that  no  action  should  be  taken  in  the 
cases  of  the  Lapsed  without  the  approval  of  the  bishop, 
and  soon  it  became  established  that  bishops  were  "judges 
in  Christ's  stead, "  that  the  right  of  readmitting  penitents 
and  the  general  powers  of  absolution  and  excommuni- 
cations were  inherent  in  the  episcopate. 

A  dispute  that  grew  out  of  the  controversy  concerning 
the  Lapsed  resulted  in  the  declaration  that  a  new  Church 
could  not  be  established  beside  an  existing  one  in  the 


six  membres  e"minents  de  l'e"piscopat,  de  sorte  que  celui  qui  saurait  dominer 
ces  derniers  serait  le  mattre  de  tout  le  reste.  .  .  .  L'e"piscopat  fute"bloui, 
fascine".  Sortant  d'une  position  pre"caire,  la  veille  encore  mis  hors  la  loi,  il 
devenait  subitement  1'objet  des  gracieusetes  impe"riales.  II  donna,  les 
yeux  ferme"s,  dans  le  piege."  A  Re"ville,  Histoire  du  Dogme  de  la  Divinite 
de  Jesus  Christ,  73. 


Catholicism  363 

same  city — that  is,  that  the  right  of  free  association  no 
longer  existed  for  Christians.  When  on  the  return  of 
peace  to  the  Church  Cornelius  became  bishop  of  Rome, 
the  party  of  uncompromising  severity,  dissatisfied  with 
his  lax  views,  procured  the  ordination  of  their  leader 
Novatian  for  their  bishop.  Cyprian  vigorously  contended 
that  the  election  was  null,  and  through  his  influence  the 
principle  finally  prevailed  that  as  there  is  one  God  and 
one  Christ  so  there  could  be  in  each  city  but  one  episcopal 
community,  and  any  attempt  to  elect  another  bishop  for  a 
separate  community  should  be  banned  with  the  name 
schism. 

We  come  finally  to  the  line  of  "  development "  which  is 
not  only  a  wide  departure  from  primitive  Christianity 
but  a  return  to  the  religions  of  pre-Christian  and  pre- 
historic times.  According  to  Harnack  we  find  that  about 
the  year  180  the  distinction  between  clergy  and  laity  has 
become  firmly  established  in  the  Church. x  In  the  earlier 
time  there  was  no  such  distinction,  or  rather  no  clergy, 
strictly  speaking,  existed.  The  internal  division  of  the 
Christian  community  into  active  and  passive,  teachers 
and  taught,  rulers  and  ruled,  was  as  yet  undreamed  of. 
The  powers  of  Church  officers  pertained  to  matters  of 
administration,  of  general  superintendence  and  control, 
but  in  all  that  concerned  the  spiritual  life  all  members  of 
the  community  stood  on  an  equal  footing.  Even  after 
the  officers  had  begun  to  assume  liturgical  functions  it 
was  not  conceded  that  they  had  an  exclusive  right  to  their 
performance.  In  the  regular  order  they  administered 
the  rite  of  baptism,  but  any  member  of  the  Church  was 
competent  to  baptise.  The  Eucharist  could  be  celebrated 
in  any  meeting  of  Christians  without  the  presence  of  a 
Church  officer,  and  that  this  was  an  existing  custom 
appears  from  the  effort  of  Ignatius  to  change  it  when  he 

1  Constitution  and  Law  of  the  Church  in  the  First  Two  Centuries,  114. 


364  Catholicism 

writes  in  mild  remonstrance:  "Let  that  be  deemed 
a  valid  Eucharist  at  which  the  bishop  presides."  This 
democratic  equality  survived  from  apostolic  days  when  the 
distinction  between  Christians  had  regard  to  the  variety 
of  spiritual  gifts.  The  charisma  was  something  personal ; 
it  did  not  distinguish  a  class  from  a  class,  but  one  Christian 
from  another.  Montanism  was  the  attempt  to  reassert 
this  charismatic  freedom  against  official  rule,  and  Tertul- 
lian  vigorously  maintained  that  office  in  the  Church  did 
not  confer  any  powers  not  possessed  by  all  its  members. 
During  the  last  half  of  the  second  century  the  original 
conception  of  ecclesiastical  office  gradually  passed  away 
and  a  different  one  grew  up  to  supplant  it  which  reached 
its  full  development  under  the  influence  of  Cyprian.  To 
him  was  owing  a  new  view  of  Apostolic  Succession  in 
respect  to  its  principle  or  motive.  In  the  preceding  cen- 
tury the  assertion  was  that  the  Apostles  had  imparted  to 
their  successors  a  teaching  received  from  Christ,  and 
through  the  line  of  bishops  the  maintenance  of  this 
apostolic  teaching  was  secured.  It  was  a  theory  suited 
to  the  times,  but  now  that  the  struggle  with  Gnosticism 
was  a  memory  and  the  Canon  of  Scripture  was  in  process 
of  formation,  the  doctrinal  tradition  no  longer  held  the 
place  of  first  importance,  and  the  Apostolic  Succession 
could  be  made  to  serve  another  purpose.  The  perpetua- 
tion of  infallible  teachers  became  the  perpetuation  of  a 
priesthood  empowered  to  offer  sacrifice  by  an  alleged 
commission  of  Christ  to  the  Apostles  and  their  successors. 
If  outside  of  the  Church  there  is  no  salvation,  it  is  mainly 
because  the  Episcopate  which  constitutes  the  Church  is 
the  depositary  of  sacerdotal  gifts  and  powers,  and  in  its 
hands  are  the  essential  means  of  grace.  This  new  gospel 
of  salvation  by  bishops  followed  upon  the  gradual  conver- 
sion of  the  Eucharist  into  a  sacrifice  and  the  Christian 
ministry  into  a  mediating  priesthood — bishops  and 


Catholicism  365 

those  holding  of  bishops.  The  priest  represents  men  to 
God  and  God  to  men,  and  it  is  only  through  him  as 
intermediary  that  laymen  have  access  to  the  Divine. 
An  early  writer1  addresses  his  Christian  readers  as  a 
holy  priesthood  for  the  offering  of  spiritual  sacrifice,  and 
frequently  in  the  New  Testament  we  find  the  name  of 
sacrifice  given  metaphorically  to  such  acts  of  devotion 
as  almsgiving,  prayer  and  praise.  The  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  carries  imagery  so  far  as  to  speak  of  an  altar 
having  place  in  the  spiritual  service  of  the  churches.  The 
use  of  metaphor  always  carries  the  danger  of  its  becom- 
ing literalised,  a  danger  the  Church  did  not  escape  when 
it  spread  among  the  Pagans,  long  familiar  with  the  ritual 
of  sacrifice.  It  was  natural  that  the  metaphor  should 
acquire  a  special  reference  to  the  Eucharist,  with  its  alms 
and  prayers  and  thanksgivings,  even  before  the  bread  and 
wine  were  thought  of  as  an  offering  of  the  body  and 
blood  of  Christ  by  the  priest  alone.  The  trend  to  sacer- 
dotalism had  indeed  been  held  in  check  by  the  strong 
feeling  of  the  universal  priesthood  of  all  Christians,  and 
if  the  minister  was  called  a  priest  it  was  only  because  he 
was  the  representative  of  a  "sacerdotal  race"  as  Origen 
called  the  Christians;  he  was  a  priest  only  in  the  sense 
in  which  every  member  of  the  congregation  was  a  priest. 
Still  any  use  of  this  term  as  a  designation  of  the  Christian 
ministry  could  not  be  divested  of  its  accepted  significance, 
could  not  but  tend  toward  the  view  of  the  ministry  as  a 
priesthood  in  the  exclusive  sense  and  after  the  ancient 
type.  The  sacerdotal  principles  of  the  Catholic  Church, 
it  should  be  understood,  are  not  so  much  a  corruption  or 
degeneration  of  original  Christianity  as  the  conquest  over 
it  by  religious  ideas  as  old  as  humanity.2  The  Church 

1 1  Peter  ii,  5. 

2  For  an  admirable  sketch  of  the  history  of  Sacrifice  and  Priesthood  see 
A.  ReVille,  ProlegomSnes  de  VHistcrire  des  Religions.    Pt.  ii,  chaps,  iii  and  iv. 


366  Catholicism 

might  claim  for  its  priesthood  a  Judaic  ancestry,  but  a 
nearer  derivation  or  closer  analogy  may  be  found  in  the 
contemporary  Asiatic  cults  where  the  Mysteries  were 
under  the  control  of  priests  who  could  admit  or  exclude 
the  votaries  of  Isis  and  Cybele  and  Mithra.  Under  exist- 
ing conditions  Cyprian  had  little  difficulty  in  enforcing 
the  sacerdotal  claims.  In  the  celebration  of  the  Eucharist 
the  act  of  the  whole  congregation  became  the  act  of  the 
bishop's  delegate,  commissioned  through  divine  agencies 
in  which  the  people  had  no  part,  and  the  former  status  of 
the  officiating  minister  as  the  people's  agent  exercising 
powers  belonging  to  themselves,  was  a  thing  of  the  for- 
gotten past.  The  sacrifice  of  praise  and  thanksgiving, 
once  the  free  expression  of  the  Christian  heart,  has  now 
become  a  sacramental  mystery  which  laymen  individually 
or  as  a  congregation  are  incompetent  to  administer.  So 
rapid  has  been  the  advance  since  the  preceding  generation 
when  Tertullian  could  ask:  "Are  not  we  laity  also  priests? 
If  it  be  necessary  you  may  baptise  and  make  the  Eucharis- 
tic  offerings  as  well  as  a  bishop.  Where  three  Christians 
are  gathered  there  is  a  Church  though  they  be  laymen." 
Besides  the  authority  derived  from  Christ  through  the 
Apostolic  Succession,  sacerdotalism  gained  further  divine 
sanction  from  the  fatally  misleading  analogy  of  the 
Christian  ministry  to  the  Jewish  priesthood  which  long 
ago  had  been  suggested  in  the  Epistle  of  Clement  and  with 
the  appearance  of  the  single  bishop  had  become  complete 
— bishop,  priests  and  deacons  answering  to  high  priest, 
priests  and  levites.  According  to  Cyprian  the  one  order 
has  succeeded  to  the  other  with  all  its  mediatorial  func- 
tions. All  the  passages  of  the  post-exilic  law  books  that 
deal  with  the  position  and  prerogatives  of  the  priesthood 
he  treats  as  applying  directly  to  the  Christian  ministry, 
and  the  priestly  fable  of  Korah,  Dathan  and  Abiram  re- 
mains a  warning  that  he  who  dares  to  question  the  author- 


Catholicism  367 

ity  of  the  Christian  priest  shall  die.  Plainly  the  spirit 
that  moved  in  the  Montanist  revolt  was  dying  out,  and 
this  tyranny  upreared  over  those  who  bowed  the  neck. 
It  is  said  that  a  people  have  the  government  they  deserve 
to  have.  "Priesthoods  come  when  they  are  needed; 
they  are  waiting  for  a  society  which  has  lost  its  savor 
and  is  no  longer  capable  of  exercising  or  appreciating  its 
freedom."1 

With  the  triumph  of  sacerdotal  principles  the  separation 
of  a  clerical  caste  from  the  body  of  Christian  believers 
became  complete  and  lasting;  and  when  Cyprian  could 
declare  that  for  a  layman  to  criticise  the  conduct  of  a 
priest  was  to  criticise  God  who  had  appointed  him,  the 
spiritual  equality  of  Christians  which  followed  from  the 
direct  relation  of  each  and  all  to  the  Divine  had  vanished 
like  the  snows  of  yesteryear.  The  clergy  began  to  pose 
as  an  order  officially  entitled  to  govern  an  ignorant  laity 
bound  to  implicit  obedience,  and  the  impassable  barrier 
between  the  two  classes  of  fellow  Christians  came  to  be 
typified  in  the  structural  arrangement  of  the  church  edifice. 
The  choir  reserved  for  the  numerous  clergy  was  separated 
from  the  rest  of  the  church  in  front  by  a  close  screen, 
commonly  of  iron-work,  and  on  three  sides  by  stone  walls 
between  it  and  the  ambulatory,  or  passage  around  it. 
"It  was  a  sort  of  church  within  the  church,  enclosed  by 
walls,  entered  only  by  gates  usually  kept  shut  and  acces- 
sible only  to  those  who  wore  the  clerical  dress" — another 
mark  of  separation.2  And  so  the  internal  unity  of  the 
Christian  society  was  secured  by  its  internal  division 
into  rulers  and  ruled,  and  the  subjection  of  nine  tenths 

1  Allen,  op.  cit.t  132.  So  too  ReVille  (Prolegomhies,  etc.,  200):  "Ce  qui 
fait  le  sacerdoce,  c'est  le  sentiment  de  I'incapacite'  de  I'homme  ordinaire 
pour  r&iliser  1'union  directe  avec  la  Divinite".  C'est  dans  ce  sentiment  de 
timidite",  de  faiblesse  craintive,  qu'en  tout  temps,  en  tout  lieu,  re"sidera  la 
grande  force  du  sacerdoce." 

a  Hatch,  Growth  of  Church  Institutions,  221. 


368  Catholicism 

of  its  members  to  the  other  tenth.  This,  rather  than 
that  later  one  of  Pope  against  Pope,  might  well  be  called 
the  Great  Schism  in  the  Church. 

6.     Christology :  Dualism  in  Thought 

Now  if  the  development  of  Church  government  leads 
to  this  issue,  it  is  only  the  appearance  in  a  particular  field 
of  a  general  principle,  the  essential  characteristic  of 
Catholicity.  It  may  be  said  with  more  exactness  than 
such  generalisations  commonly  possess  that  while  the 
keyword  of  the  Gospel  is  unity,  that  of  historic  Chris- 
tianity is  Dualism,  a  dualism  that  rules  all  thought  and 
life.  It  appears  with  the  Apostle  Paul  in  the  contrast 
so  sharply  drawn  between  Adam  and  Christ,  flesh  and 
spirit,  will  and  grace,  church  and  world.  This  ground 
thought  was  taken  up  from  the  philosophy  so  long  and  so 
widely  prevalent.1  The  problem  for  Neo-Platonism  was 
to  reconcile  the  antagonism  between  the  spiritual  and  the 
material,  the  infinite  and  the  finite,  the  human  and  the 
divine;  but  inasmuch  as  it  held  the  opposition  of  the  two 
terms  to  be  absolute,  it  naturally  failed  to  reach  a  solution. 
And  so  this  philosophy  remained  a  vain  quest  for  unity; 
it  felt  the  need  of  a  mediation  which  was  impossible  of 
attainment  on  the  principles  of  the  system,  for  these 
inevitably  brought  out  and  made  persistent  the  division 
comprehended  in  every  concrete  object  of  thought.  It 
was  by  a  historic  necessity  in  the  last  degree  unfortunate 
that  the  categories  of  Christian  thought,  the  general 
conceptions  by  which  it  worked,  were  derived  from  a 
philosophy  so  profoundly  dualistic.  The  Gospel  revela- 
tion of  God  contains  that  of  man's  relation  to  Him,  the 

1  "Both  Jewish  and  Greek  thought  fed  upon  the  antithesis,  the  eternal 
and  painfully  perplexing  separation,  of  the  divine  and  human  natures." 
Keim,  Jesus  of  Nazara,  vi,  387. 


Catholicism  369 

revelation  of  the  essential  unity  of  human  and  divine. 
God  is  spirit,  and  since  man  too  is  spirit  he  is  mirrored  to 
himself  in  the  Divine,  and  finds  in  the  pivine  his  own 
essential  being.  This  is  religious  self -consciousness ;  it  was 
the  self-consciousness  of  Jesus,  and  the  intuition  of  this 
unity  was  given  to  men  as  manifested  in  his  life.  But 
so  given  it  was  not  fully  grasped  by  Christian  faith. 
Apprehended  only  in  an  individual  form,  its  universal 
significance  was  hidden  under  that  limitation;  and  very 
soon  the  unity  of  God  and  man  was  virtually  denied 
by  the  restriction  of  its  realisation,  either  as  actual  or 
possible,  to  the  person  of  Christ. x  Let  us  understand  what 
this  unity  means.  The  uniting  of  two  is  not  their  merger 
or  fusion.  If  divinity  is  predicable  of  all  humanity,  it  is 
plain  that  the  distinction  between  divinity  and  deity, 
between  man  and  God,  is  not  thereby  obliterated.  On  the 
other  hand  if  divinity  is  only  predicable  of  one  man,  this 
one  and  only  divine  man  is  by  his  uniqueness  differenti- 
ated from  humanity,  and  his  divinity  tends  to  become 
indistinguishable  from  deity.  This  divinity  of  Christ 
was,  so  to  speak,  conceived  as  static  rather  than  dynamic ; 
not  as  won  by  effort  of  spiritual  energy  and  a  discipline  of 
utter  self-surrender,  but  as  existing  ready  made,  inde- 
pendently of  any  process  whatever.  So  conceived  it  was 
placed  out  of  all  relation  to  the  human  race.  It  was  not 
that  one  man,  losing  himself  to  find  himself,  rose  through 
this  self-realisation  to  intimate  union  with  God,  and 
showed  the  way  to  this  union  open  to  all  who  would  follow 
his  footsteps — showed  that  God-likeness  is  only  the  reali- 
sation of  an  ideal  which  every  human  soul  bears  within 

1  "The  Church  maintained  in  a  single  isolated  experience  the  sublime 
reality  of  a  union  of  God  with  our  humanity.  It  remains  for  it  to  throw 
open  to  all  in  the  boundless  future  what  it  has  hitherto  believed  to  be  the 
s  ole  prerogative  of  Jesus  Christ."  J.  Estlin  Carpenter,  The  Historic  Jesus 
and  the  Theological  Christ,  175. 
24 


370  Catholicism 

it — it  was  simply  that  there  existed  one  superhuman 
being,  the  Only-Begotten  of  his  Father  before  all  worlds. 
Jesus  tells  us  we  all  are  children  of  the  Heavenly  Father, 
and  bids  us  rise  to  that  consciousness  and  strive  to  make 
real  the  potentiality  of  our  being.  The  response  of 
humanity  has  been  the  renunciation  of  all  claim  on  its 
part  to  a  nature  one  with  God's  in  kind:  we  are  but 
men,  it  runs;  you  only  are  divine.  With  this  a  gulf 
opened  between  the  Christ  and  his  human  brethren. 
If  such  were  the  nature  of  his  divinity  there  was  no 
longer  any  meaning  in  the  call  that  summoned  the  first 
Christians  to  make  his  life  their  inspiration,  to  follow  his 
example  and  win  his  spirit.  The  rise  into  union  with  the 
Divine  was  no  longer  the  goal  of  men's  spiritual  striving, 
was  not  even  an  ideal  for  hopeless  longing.  The  Spirit 
in  which  man  was  not  mirrored  to  himself  appeared  as 
wholly  alien  to  him,  and  the  Christian  world  threw  itself 
in  self-abasement,  fear  and  trembling  at  the  feet  of  the 
Divine.  Thus  the  old  severance  of  God  from  man  which 
Jesus  sought  to  do  away  with  reappeared  when  he,  their 
union,  was  lifted  to  the  skies  and  lost  in  a  dogma  as  to  the 
nature  of  the  Deity. x 

For  this  was  the  inevitable  result,  although  unsought 
and  unforeseen,  of  age-long  controversy.  From  the  first 

1  "Men  found  it  impossible  that  as  the  Son  of  God  he  could  be  a  man, 
but  necessary  that  he  should  be  God.  The  adjustment  was  extended  to 
heaven;  the  Son  was  held  to  be  a  celestial  being  really  clothed  for  a  time 
in  human  flesh.  In  this  way  men  ennobled  the  humanity  which  the  Son  of 
God  had  visited,  yet  they  nevertheless  robbed  it  of  the  true  understanding 
of  Jesus,  namely,  that  he  was  its  own,  and  that  human  nature  without  any 
fiction  of  mechanical  mediation,  without  transformation  or  decoration, 
was  capable,  as  in  him  so  in  all  men,  of  the  perfect  indwelling  of  God. 
The  divinity  conferred  upon  Jesus  stood  in  close  connection  with  that 
Alexandrine  philosophy  which  sought  to  fill  the  gulf  between  God  and 
man  with  the  phantom  of  a  heavenly  man  in  antithesis  to  the  earthly  man. 
Thus  the  ecclesiastical  doctrine  of  the  divinity  of  Jesus  is  the  product  of 
he  mode  of  thought  of  the  vanquished  Judaism."  Keim,  op.  cit.,  vi,  387. 


Catholicism  371 

there  were  two  different  views  of  Christ's  divinity;  there 
was  the  Christology  "from  above  "  and  that  "from  below, " 
and  while  the  opposition  to  Docetism  strengthened  for  a 
time  the  insistence  upon  his  substantial  humanity,  the 
constant  trend  of  Christian  feeling  toward  the  greater 
glorification  of  the  Divine  Master  brought  increasing 
numbers  to  regard  him  as  not  less  than  a  God.  The 
Humanitarians  appealed  to  the  earliest  tradition  against 
this  alarming  innovation,  and  reproached  their  opponents 
with  deviating  from  the  ancient  monotheistic  faith;  and 
when  some  to  escape  this  charge  explained  that  in  their 
view  Christ  was  not  a  distinct  divinity,  but  his  divine 
nature  was  blended  with  that  of  the  Deity,  the  consequence 
was  pressed  upon  them  that  then  the  Father  must  have 
shared  the  suffering  and  death  of  the  Son.1 

For  more  than  a  century  after  its  appearance  in  the 
Shepherd  of  Hermas  (c.  140),  a  theory  called  "Adoption- 
ist"  maintained  a  certain  prevalence  in  East  and  West. 
It  regarded  Christ  as  a  man  inspired  by  the  divine  Logos 
aftd  in  virtue  of  his  holiness,  his  complete  submission  to  the 
will  of  God,  adopted  as  His  Son.  Such  a  conception, 
however,  fell  below  the  requirements  of  the  high  Chris- 
tology, which  was  continually  gaining  strength,  and  when 
at  length  its  eminent  defender,  Paul  of  Samosata,  was 
deposed  by  the  Council  of  Antioch  in  269,  the  virulent 
abuse  heaped  upon  his  head  testified  to  the  growing 
unpopularity  of  the  Humanitarian  contention.  Although 
this  Council,  as  mentioned  in  the  preceding  note,  re- 
pudiated the  doctrine  that  Christ  was  homo-ousios — of  the 
same  substance — with  the  Father,  yet  to  this  extreme 
position  the  mind  of  the  Church  was  tending,  despite 
the  active  opposition  the  movement  encountered.  Indeed 

1  This  doctrine  was  nevertheless  maintained  by  three  successive  bishops 
of  Rome  before  it  was  condemned  under  the  name  of  the  Patripassion  heresy 
by  the  Synod  of  Antioch  in  269. 


372  Catholicism 

during  the  second  and  third  centuries  the  defenders  of 
the  ' 'Monarchy,"  as  it  was  called,  who  maintained  the 
position  of  the  primitive  age  with  regard  to  Christ,  re- 
mained a  party  of  considerable  strength,  and  Tertullian 
even  admits  that  in  his  day  they  represented  the  senti- 
ments of  a  majority.  As  the  dispute  went  on  it  waxed 
ever  more  acrimonious.  Theologians  on  both  sides  were 
equally  impressed  with  the  conviction  that  nothing  could 
be  more  senseless  or  wicked  than  disagreement  with  their 
respective  opinions;  but  controversy  only  brought  to  view 
difficulties  it  could  not  surmount.  In  vain  men  strove 
to  find  a  compromise  between  two  contradictory  pro- 
positions, such  as  the  distinct  personality  of  the  Son  and 
his  indistinguishable  unity  with  the  Father.  The  theories 
propounded  were  necessarily  vague  and  nebulous,  since 
impossible  combinations  do  not  lend  themselves  to  clear 
statement,  and  the  labors  of  Origen  only  served  to  make 
confusion  worse  confounded.  He  thought  to  save  the 
principle  of  Monotheism  by  a  distinction  between  the 
supreme  and  the  inferior  God  (duioOsoc;  and  Beutspo?  6eo<;), 
but  one  attribute  at  least  they  shared,  for  his  theory  of  an 
eternal  generation  regards  the  Logos  or  Son  as  co-eternal 
with  the  Father.  Whether  this  was  a  generation  out  of 
the  substance,  or  by  an  act  of  will,  the  learned  theologian 
left  undecided,  vacillating  between  one  view  and  the 
other,  and  thus  between  equality  and  subordination.  Now 
with  the  voice  of  Athanasius  he  speaks  of  the  Son  as  homo- 
ousios  with  the  Father,  and  again  with  Paul  of  Samosata 
declares  him  one  with  God  through  mere  unity  or  con- 
formity of  will. 

On  the  whole  we  find  that  at  the  opening  of  the  fourth 
century  the  doctrine  generally  accepted  regards  the 
Word  as  a  secondary  subordinate  deity  who  became  in- 
carnate in  Jesus  Christ.  Thus  Christ  is  a  God,  yet  not 
quite  God;  it  was  a  position  of  unstable  equilibrium  that 


Catholicism  373 

left  it  open  to  theorists  to  lay  stress  now  on  the  difference 
between  the  Son  and  the  Father,  now  on  their  unity. 

From  this  oscillation  issued  the  two  doctrines  of  Arius 
and  Athanasius,  and  their  long  struggle  until  the  one  was 
overwhelmed  by  the  other.  Arius  was  a  presbyter  of 
Alexandria  who  had  brought  with  him  to  that  home  of 
Neo-Platonic  mysticism  the  reasoning  spirit  and  methods 
of  the  liberal  school  of  Antioch.  He  took  up  the  problem 
of  the  eternal  generation,  which  Origen  had  left  to  his 
successors,  and  submitted  it  to  a  logical  criticism.  His 
conclusion  was  that  the  notion  of  eternal  generation  was 
self-contradictory.  A  generated  being  could  not  be  an 
eternal  one;  eternity  was  incompatible  with  sonship; 
if  Christ  was  begotten  he  must  have  had  a  beginning,  and, 
as  Tertullian  had  affirmed  without  prejudice  to  his 
orthodoxy,  there  must  have  been  a  time  when  the  Son 
"was  not"  (Fuit  tempus  cum  films  non  fuit).  All  agree, 
pursued  Arius,  that  the  Son  is  subordinate  to  the  Father; 
that  is,  he  is  not  equal  to  the  Father.  Not  being  equal, 
he  cannot  be  of  the  same  substance  with  the  Father.  For 
if  he  were  he  would  be  perfect  God,  since  that  substance 
is  perfect,  and  there  would  be  two  perfect  and  equal  Gods. 
Therefore  whether  we  say  of  him  that  he  was  begotten 
or  was  created,  it  comes  to  the  same  thing:  namely,  that 
he  has  not  in  himself  the  principle  of  his  existence,  and 
this  is  precisely  the  difference  between  creatures  and  the 
uncreated  Being.  In  all  this  Arius  was  no  heretic.1 
All  Scripture  taught  the  inferiority  of  the  Son,  and  every 
writer  up  to  the  fourth  century  had  held  the  same  view, 
which  was  an  integral  part  of  the  original  theory  of  the 
Logos  and  necessary  to  preserve  the  principle  of  Mono- 
theism. The  main  positions  of  Arius  were  those  of  the 

1  "En  definitive  Arius  n'avait  d'autre  tort  que  de  mettre  un  peu  rude- 
ment  les  points  sur  les  *  de  la  doctrine  ecctesiastique  en  vigueur  avant  lui." 
A.  Re"ville,  Histoire  du  Dogme  de  la  Divinite  de  Jesus  Christ,  76. 


374  Catholicism 

eminent  Tertullian ;  for  him  too  there  was  practically  no  dif- 
ference of  meaning  between  the  expressions  "begotten"  or 
* 'created."  And  as  for  the  denial  of  the  Son's  consubstan- 
tiality  with  the  Father,  Arius  could  invoke  in  its  support 
the  decree  of  the  Council  of  Antioch  which  had  excom- 
municated Paul  of  Samosata.  Yet  it  was  of  no  avail 
that  the  ecclesiastical  tradition  was  all  in  his  favor;  if 
the  past  was  with  Arius,  the  present  and  future  were 
against  him.  The  rising  tide  of  Christian  sentiment 
was  making  toward  the  conviction  that  Christ  was  no 
less  than  God,  and  Arius  was  struggling  against  it  while 
his  adversaries  were  borne  upon  its  current.  The  pro- 
positions he  advanced  were  such  as  the  partisans  of  the 
high  Christology  could  not  refute  and  would  not  accept, 
and  at  a  Synod  convened  by  his  bishop  his  arguments 
were  met  by  deposition  and  excommunication. 

Arius  however  found  numerous  and  influential  sup- 
porters, and  a  bitter  controversy  arose  which  the  Emperor 
sought  to  quell  by  summoning  the  whole  order  of  bishops 
to  a  council  at  Nicaea.  The  leader  of  the  opposition  to  the 
Arian  doctrines  was  Athanasius,  archdeacon  of  Alexandria, 
who  boldly  took  stand  for  the  theory  of  consubstantiality, 
which  carried  with  it  all  that  Arius  contested,  relying  upon 
the  unity  of  substance  common  to  the  Father  and  the 
Son  to  meet  sufficiently  the  objection  of  Ditheism :  that  is, 
a  metaphysical  abstraction  was  taken  for  the  one  God. 
The  majority  of  the  Council  regarded  the  Athanasian 
contention  as  an  innovation  they  were  not  disposed  to 
accept,  while  at  the  same  time  they  found  the  sharp  defini- 
tions of  Arius  too  extreme  for  their  liking.  They  at- 
tempted to  steer  a  middle  course  and  drew  up  a  confession 
of  faith — whose  key  word  was  homoi-ousia;  of  like  sub- 
stance— which  maintained  the  traditional  idea  of  the  sub- 
ordination of  the  Son,  while  allowing  him  as  many  divine 
attributes  as  might  be  without  passing  that  limit.  This 


Catholicism  375 

creed,  elastic  enough  to  secure  the  adhesion  of  the  Arians, 
they  almost  succeeded  in  adopting,  but  the  opponents  of 
Anus  persuaded  the  Emperor  that  equivocal  expressions 
would  not  end  the  difference,  that  the  Council  would  fail 
of  its  mission  if  the  matter  were  not  pushed  to  a  definite 
conclusion,  and  Constantine  instructed  the  bishops  that 
they  must  pronounce  distinctly  for  the  homo-ousia  if 
they  wished  to  please  him.  The  majority  yielded  re- 
luctantly to  the  pressure  of  the  temporal  power,  with 
mental  reservations  as  to  the  exact  sense  of  the  Athanasian 
term,  and  only  a  few  were  found  to  face  the  penalty  of 
banishment  for  their  conscientious  convictions.  The  Creed 
finally  set  forth  declared  "the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  the  Son 
of  God,  the  only  begotten  of  the  Father"  to  be  "true  God 
out  of  true  God,  of  one  substance  with  the  Father." 
The  resources  of  Catholicism  were  employed  to  account 
for  the  inconvenient  error  of  the  Synod  which  had  for- 
mally condemned  this  doctrine  half  a  century  before, 
and  the  infallibility  of  the  Church  was  preserved  by 
ingenious  quibbles;  but  it  seems  to  have  escaped  notice 
that  the  statement  of  the  Creed  goes  beyond  the  language 
of  the  fourth  gospel  and  is  at  variance  with  its  teaching. x 
The  point  to  note  is  that  the  Creed  seizes  both  horns  of  the 
Arian  dilemma — either  eternity  or  sonship — and  placing 
these  contradictory  ideas  side  by  side,  accepts  them  both 
without  attempting  their  conciliation.  This  continued 
to  be  the  simple  method  of  Catholic  Christology.  It  soon 
became  evident  that  the  victory  of  Athanasius  was  more 
apparent  than  real.  Gained  by  imperial  authority  rather 
than  by  the  free  judgment  of  bishops  in  Council  it  proved 
ineffective  to  the  suppression  of  Arianism  among  the 
churches  or  even  in  high  circles  of  the  Court.  Far  from 
quenching  the  fires  of  theological  strife,  the  Nicene  deci- 

1  "That  they  may  know  Thee,  the  only  true  God  and  Jesus  Christ 
whom  Thou  hast  sent."    John  xvii,  3. 


376  Catholicism 

sion  only  fanned  them  to  fiercer  heat,  until  more  than 
fifty  years  later  they  were  trampled  out  by  the  Edict  of 
Theodosius. 

The  story  of  the  fluctuating  conflict  of  the  fourth 
century  is  full  of  instruction  for  us.  Arianism  was  an 
untenable  system,  but  with  all  its  defects  it  stood  for 
rationalism  against  a  crude  dogmatising  metaphysic, 
backed  by  ecclesiastical  authority  and  defended  by 
ardent  and  ignorant  monks  rather  than  by  reason.  The 
triumph  of  Arianism  would  have  been  the  first  step  toward 
a  return  to  primitive  Christianity  and  the  principles 
reasserted  more  than  a  thousand  years  later  on  the  eve 
of  the  Reformation.  Hence  it  was  impossible.  Such  a 
movement  was  bound  to  succumb  before  the  overwhelm- 
ing forces  making  for  the  establishment  of  the  dogmatic 
sacerdotal  Catholicism  that  ruled  the  Middle  Ages. 

Meanwhile,  after  the  question  of  Christ's  divinity, 
arose  that  of  his  incarnation.  The  Creed  merely  stated 
the  fact  that  the  Son  of  God,  of  one  substance  with  the 
Father,  was  incarnate  and  was  made  man.  Its  framers 
bent  all  their  efforts  to  establishing  the  coequal  deity  of 
Christ,  and  the  problems  presented  by  his  nature  and 
person,  as  at  once  human  and  divine,  were  left  uncon- 
sidered.  Had  Christ  a  human  soul  besides  his  divine  one, 
and  if  so  did  this  dualism  of  natures  involve  a  duality  of 
persons,  or  were  the  two  natures  blended  in  a  single 
personality?  Here  speculation  plunged  into  labyrinthine 
entanglements  and  wandered  for  generations  in  mazes 
without  an  issue.  For  all  discussion  started  from  the 
absolute  opposition  of  divine  and  human,  and  never  got 
beyond  that  starting-point.  The  Anthanasians  found 
the  assertion  of  a  human  soul  in  God  the  Son,  with  its 
freedom  of  will  and  liability  to  sin,  repugnant  to  their 
tenets,  and  Apollinaris  of  Laodicea,  clinging  to  the  doc- 
trine of  consubstantiality  as  interpreter  of  the  person 


Catholicism  377 

of  the  Christ,  contended  that  his  human  nature  must  be 
regarded  as  nothing  more  than  a  semblance.  Since  man  is 
a  conscious,  self-determining  agent,  to  add  deity  to  a 
supposed  manhood  of  Christ  would  be  to  make  two  con- 
scious agents,  or  two  persons.  Hence  he  argued  for  the 
single  nature  of  the  Word  made  flesh;  according  to  this 
monophysite  theory  the  Only-Begotten  Son  had  merely 
assumed  the  temporary  robe  of  an  earthly  body.  This 
explicit  denial  that  Jesus  had  been  a  real  man  seems  a 
necessary  deduction  from  the  Nicene  doctrine,  but  if  the 
argument  could  not  be  answered,  the  conclusion  was  dis- 
tasteful; a  Christ  of  a  nature  wholly  divine  the  Church 
was  not  prepared  to  accept,  and  the  doctrine  of  Apol- 
linaris  was  condemned  by  the  Council  of  Constantinople. 
From  the  first  it  had  been  maintained  against  the  Docetists 
that  humanity  was  essential  to  the  Redeemer  of  mankind ; 
no  salvation  could  be  effected  by  a  phantom  Christ  who 
did  not  share  the  nature  he  came  to  save. 

This  thesis  now  found  a  defender  in  Theodore  of  Mopsu- 
estia  who  made  the  starting-point  of  his  Christology  the 
scriptural  tradition  of  the  human  life.  He  pointed  out 
that  the  plain  indications  of  a  moral  experience  spread 
upon  the  face  of  the  gospels  could  have  no  meaning  had 
not  Christ  possessed  a  rational  human  soul.  From  its 
activity  came  the  perfection  of  obedience  and  piety  that 
won  for  him  the  indwelling  of  Deity.  The  Word  had 
taken,  or  "adapted,"  to  himself  a  perfect  man,  and  the 
two  natures  were  conjoined  in  the  unity  of  his  person. 
Such  stress  was  laid,  however,  upon  the  distinction  of  the 
divine  from  the  human  that  it  was  pushed  to  their  separa- 
tion, lest  the  divine  should  be  abased  by  blending  with  the 
human,  or  the  human  impaired  by  the  loss  of  an  essential 
constituent.  At  this  point  it  began  to  appear  that  true 
God  could  not  be  at  the  same  time  true  man.  On  one 
theory  the  human  nature  disappeared  in  the  divine,  and 


Catholicism 

on  the  other  the  two  natures  were  so  mutually  exclusive 
that  the  unity  of  the  person  lost  reality.  On  the  whole 
it  seemed  that  Christ  must  be  regarded  as  either  God 
or  man,  according  to  one's  prepossessions  or  the  weight 
to  be  attached  to  arguments  in  support  of  the  opposite 
views  of  theologians.  At  the  same  time  it  was  equally 
apparent  that  Christian  sentiment  would  surrender 
neither  the  humanity  nor  the  deity  of  Christ,  and  various 
attempts  were  made  to  construct  a  theory  which  should 
satisfy  these  opposite  requirements  and  put  an  end  to  the 
discord  that  rent  the  Church.  It  proved  a  task  impossible 
of  accomplishment,  and  the  wrangle  over  the  two  natures 
grew  in  violence  year  by  year. 

It  came  to  a  climax  when  Nestorius,  patriarch  of 
Constantinople,  a  disciple  of  Theodore  and  like  him  a 
student  of  Antioch,  protested  against  the  title  Mother  of 
God  (0eoT6Ko<;)  applied  to  the  Virgin  Mary  by  the  partisans 
of  the  high  Christology.  God,  he  said,  could  not  be  born, 
nor  a  creature  bring  forth  its  creator;  the  proper  term  for 
Mary  was  Mother  of  Man,  of  the  humanity  which  the 
Logos  made  his  organ.  These  statements,  which  appear 
not  unreasonable,  soon  reached  the  ear  of  his  unscrupulous 
enemy,  Cyril  of  Alexandria,  the  same  who  had  set  on  his 
monks  to  the  murder  of  Hypatia.  This  exemplary 
Christian  seized  the  occasion  to  accuse  his  colleague  of 
heresy  in  making  Christ  a  mere  man,  and  moved  heaven 
and  earth  to  secure  his  condemnation.  He  gained  the 
support  of  the  Roman  bishop  by  charging  Nestorius  with 
Pelagianism,  something  Celestine  was  contending  with 
at  the  time  and  better  understood  than  the  Christological 
subtleties  that  distracted  the  East.  With  this  aid  he  man- 
aged to  control  the  Council  summoned  by  the  Emperor 
at  the  instance  of  Nestorius,  and  that  unfortunate  prelate 
was  deposed  and  driven  into  exile.  This  Council  of 
Ephesus  decided  against  Nestorius  that  the  two  natures 


Catholicism  379 

in  Christ  were  not  separable  but  united,  without  explain- 
ing, however,  what  was  to  be  understood  by  such  resultant 
union,  and  the  way  was  left  open  to  interpret  it  as  the 
complete  absorption  of  the  human  nature  in  the  divine, 
as  of  "  a  drop  of  vinegar  which  leaves  no  trace  when  poured 
into  the  sea."  This  was  in  effect  to  revive  the  doctrine 
of  the  single  nature  of  the  Word  made  flesh,  and  Eutychus, 
an  abbot  of  Constantinople,  who  pressed  the  decree  of 
Ephesus  to  this  conclusion,  was  excommunicated  as  a 
follower  of  Apollinaris.  His  cause  was  espoused  with 
ardor  by  Dioskoros,  the  worthy  successor  of  Cyril  in  the 
See  of  Alexandria,  and  Eutychus  was  acquitted  and 
restored  by  a  second  Council  of  Ephesus,  acting  under  the 
patriarch's  dictation,  and  terrorised  by  the  fierce  Egyptian 
monks.  Leo  of  Rome,  to  whom  both  parties  had  ap- 
pealed for  support,  rejected  the  decrees  of  this  Council, 
since  known  to  history  by  his  scornful  appellation  of  a 
Latrocinium,  or  Synod  of  Brigands.  Dioskoros  retaliated 
by  excommunicating  his  great  rival  of  the  West,  and  the 
strife  threatened  to  become  world-wide  when  a  sudden 
change  of  rulers  brought  a  reversal  of  the  imperial  policy. 
Support  was  withdrawn  from  Dioskoros  and  another 
Council  was  called  to  undo  the  work  at  Ephesus. 

This  was  the  famous  Council  of  Chalcedon  (A.D.  451), 
which  condemned  alike  the  extreme  positions  of  the 
opposing  parties  with  regard  to  the  nature  and  person  of 
Christ,  and  practically  determined  the  orthodox  Creed. 
Leo  was  appointed  president  and  though  he  did  not  attend 
in  person  he  sent  by  his  representatives  a  long  letter 
conveying  his  own  views  of  the  questions  at  issue,  and 
this  became  the  basis  of  the  formula  adopted  by  the  Council 
after  long  and  hot  debate.  That  Christ  was  one  person 
with  two  natures  was  declared  to  be  the  interpretation  of 
the  Nicene  Creed.  That  is  to  say,  in  the  God-Man  divine 
omnipotence,  omniscience  and  holiness  together  with 


380  Catholicism 

human  ignorance,  weakness  and  infirmity  existed  at  one 
and  the  same  time.  This  paradox  was  imposed  upon  the 
faith  of  Christendom  by  that  Roman  Church  which  re- 
garded all  questions  from  the  viewpoint  of  ecclesiastical 
interests,  and  was  disposed  to  champion  the  thesis  dear 
to  the  piety  of  the  multitude  rather  than  those  maintained 
by  a  philosophy  of  which  it  knew  little  and  for  which  it 
cared  less.  Thus  the  problem  which  had  occupied  so 
many  generations  was  abandoned.  How,  in  what  manner, 
the  divine  and  the  human  natures,  each  existing  in  its 
own  mode  of  being,  were  united  in  one  personality  there 
was  no  attempt  to  explain ;  there  was  merely  the  assertion 
of  the  union  as  a  fact,  or  properly,  a  dogma.  The  Council 
of  Chalcedon  speaks  the  language  of  pure  unreason  when 
it  pronounces  Jesus  Christ  real  and  true  God,  perfect  in 
Godhead  and  perfect  in  manhood,  uniting  in  himself 
their  two  natures — which  retain  their  opposition  of  finite 
and  infinite — without  separation  or  division,  without 
absorption  or  confusion,  and  without  change  of  either, 
each  nature  conserving  its  own  properties;  and  not 
parted  or  divided  into  two  persons,  but  their  duality  in 
nowise  affecting  the  unity  of  his  person.  Upon  this 
R6ville  remarks :  ' '  Un  tel  decret  comprenne  qui  pourra. ' ' 
But  Christian  piety  had  long  been  fed  on  contradictions 
and  had  acquired  a  relish  for  the  diet,  and  the  decree 
could  be  accepted  in  the  spirit  of  Tertullian's  declaration : 
"It  is  credible  because  absurd,  certain  because  impossible." 
To  those  who  employ  other  criteria  of  credibility  and 
certainty  the  doctrine  of  Chalcedon  presents  some  diffi- 
culty. The  two  natures  stand  side  by  side  in  the  unity 
of  the  person,  and  it  seems  to  a  reflecting  mind  as  hard  for 
him  to  make  them  go  together  as  for  one  to  ride  two 
horses.  The  puzzle  of  a  twofold  consciousness  baffles 
understanding  and  it  is  -not  satisfying  to  be  told  that 
Christ  was  ignorant  as  man  of  what  at  the  same  time  he 


Catholicism  381 

knew  as  God.  This  vague,  elusive  personality  of  a  being 
half  human,  half  divine  hovers  beyond  men's  mental 
grasp.  Too  divine  to  be  really  human  and  too  human  to 
be  quite  divine,  the  Christ  both  God  and  man  turns  out  in 
effect  to  be  neither  God  nor  man. 

If  we  review  the  long  Christological  debate  which  has 
been  hastily  outlined — and  which  as  Keim  says,  "ended 
with  the  infirmities  and  absurdities  of  dotage" — it  will 
be  plain  that  no  other  issue  than  this  was  possible ;  that  is, 
no  efforts  to  harmonise  the  views  of  opposing  theologians 
could  meet  with  success.  If  unity  of  person  were  insisted 
on  the  duality  of  natures  had  to  be  tacitly  abandoned,  or 
vice  versa.  The  rival  schools  of  Antioch  and  Alexandria 
might  argue  from  these  opposite  standpoints  and  vigor- 
ously excommunicate  one  another  for  confusing  the  natures, 
or  dividing  the  person,  but  if  each  could  confute  the 
arguments  of  the  other,  neither  could  establish  its  own. 
It  becomes  plain  that  under  the  thought  conditions  of  the 
epoch  the  dogma  of  the  union  of  divinity  and  humanity 
in  the  person  of  Christ  was  doomed  to  remain  nugatory, 
since  it  was  merely  a  formal,  empty  declaration  in  face 
of  a  persistent  opposition,  the  original  postulate  which 
tenaciously  held  its  ground.  The  essential  dualism  of 
human  and  divine  was  for  everyone  an  ultimate  truth, 
and  none  dreamed  of  calling  it  in  question.  Christian 
thought  was  tethered  to  this  preconception  and  struggled 
in  vain  to  get  beyond  it;  and  it  was  because  of  this  unre- 
solved antithesis  that  a  God-Man,  a  being  at  once  divine 
and  human,  remained  a  self-contradictory  conception 
which  no  amount  of  labored  exposition  could  render 
intelligible.  Christology  could  find  no  issue  from  the 
cul  de  sac,  and  for  all  its  effort  was  left  with  a  contradic- 
tion as  the  last  word — a  contradiction  complacently 
accepted  by  the  Church.  There  were  many,  however, 
who  balked  at  the  defiance  of  reason,  by  whom  contradic- 


382  Catholicism 

tory  notions  could  not  be  hospitably  entertained.  The 
restless  Greek  intellect  was  not  to  be  halted  in  its  quest 
of  the  unattainable  solution  of  the  problem,  but  now  all 
further  endeavor  to  eliminate  the  contradiction  became 
heresy.  The  theologians  condemned  as  heretics  were 
those  who  sought  to  form  some  theory  of  the  mystifying 
dogma  that  would  render  it  comprehensible,  but  no  such 
theory  could  be  reconciled  with  orthodoxy. 

In  the  eighth  century  we  find  a  confession  of  faith 
winning  wide  acceptance  in  the  West  which  goes  by  the 
name  of  the  Athanasian  Creed;  but  while  its  origin  is 
uncertain,  and  its  author  unknown,  its  attribution  to 
Athanasius,  the  true  sequel  to  whose  Christology  was 
that  of  Apollinaris,  is  palpably  absurd.  It  is  drawn  with 
a  view  to  clinch  the  statements  of  Chalcedon  and  to  en- 
force in  all  its  rigor  the  Roman  doctrine  which  prevailed 
in  that  Council  by  stopping  every  crevice  which  might 
let  in  a  breath  of  heresy,  and  threatening  the  recalcitrant 
with  eternal  damnation.  This  Creed  sums  up  the  labor 
of  Christian  thought  during  seven  centuries,  and  soon 
came  to  be  regarded  as  one  of  the  most  sacred  documents 
in  possession  of  the  Church.  The  candid  audacity,  or  the 
brutal  frankness,  with  which  it  carefully  enumerates  and 
defines  the  contradictions  of  the  orthodox  theology  till  one 
might  believe  it  the  burlesque  of  an  adversary,  could  not 
shake  its  hold  upon  the  veneration  of  the  pious.  And  yet 
for  all  its  dogged  insistence  on  the  humanity  of  Christ 
the  practical  effect  of  its  dogmatic  method  upon  men's 
views  of  the  God-Man  could  not  be  averted.  Mono- 
phy sites  and  Monothelites  could  be  excommunicated, 
but  one  term  of  the  antithesis  was  bound  to  swallow  the 
other.  Unconscious  logic  drew  the  bnly  conclusion  from 
the  original  premises:  if  man  was  in  no  sense  divine,  the 
divine  Christ  was  in  no  sense  human.  To  this  negation 
all  had  been  tending  from  the  first.  In  so  far  as  the  idea 


Catholicism  383 

of  the  incarnate  Logos  gained  predominance  the  life  of 
Jesus  was  fading  to  a  merely  illusive  appearance  of  one 
who  was  not  a  real  human  being  at  all ;  and  though  Docet- 
ism  might  be  expelled  from  the  door,  it  re-entered  at  the 
window  when  the  glorified  Christ  was  so  absolutely  sepa- 
rated from  his  fellow-men  that  his  humanity  suffered  com- 
plete eclipse.  Gradually  he  melted  into  the  general  notion 
of  the  Godhead  and  as  Divine  Man  vanished  from  the 
sight  of  Christendom. 

The  course  of  Christian  thought  followed  that  of  Neo- 
Platonism.  As  the  World-Soul  of  Plotinus,  the  link  be- 
tween intelligence  and  matter,  was  itself  taken  up  into 
the  sphere  of  the  intelligible  and  lost  its  mediating  func- 
tion, so  it  was  with  the  idea  of  the  God-Man.  And  as  a 
hierarchy  of  powers  reaching  up  to  the  Absolute  from  the 
material  world  was  the  next  invention  of  Greek  thinkers 
to  supply  the  necessary  mediation,  so  the  Virgin  and  the 
Saints  had  to  be  brought  in  to  fill  the  vacant  place  of 
Christ. 

It  remains  to  insist  upon  a  view  which  has  already  found 
expression  (Messianism,  76).  The  reaction  against  Athan- 
asian  ditheism  has  led  to  a  "  humanitarian  "  view  of  Jesus 
that  makes  him  a  man  like  another,  a  Jew  of  his  time, 
subject  to  the  influences  of  his  environment  and  on  the 
level  of  his  countrymen.  Yet  what  is  strikingly  distinc- 
tive of  Jesus  is  his  independence  of  the  environment. 
Historically  he  comes  from  all  the  past  of  Israel,  as  Shake- 
speare from  the  past  of  England,  yet  to  a  deeper  view 
it  is  an  accident  that  Jesus  is  a  Jew,  as  it  is  an  accident 
that  Hamlet  is  a  Dane.  Jesus  is  a  Man,  with  a  manhood 
that  overpasses  all  racial  limitations.  The  historical  con- 
ditions amidst  which  he  appeared  do  not  explain  how  he 
became  creator  of  a  new  epoch  in  the  history  of  religion. 
No  man  in  all  history  was  so  little  the  creature  of  his  age, 


384  Catholicism 

and  no  one  of  sound  judgment  would  venture  to  say  that 
that  age  would  have  been  much  the  same  turning-point 
in  religious  history  if  Jesus  had  never  quitted  his  native 
town.  Rather  would  such  a  one  be  disposed  to  accept 
an  opposite  view  which  has  been  thus  expressed : 

There  have  been  crises  in  human  history  and  revolutions 
in  human  life  manifestly  due  to  the  appearance  of  some 
towering  genius  whom  his  age  could  not  understand  and  could 
but  slowly  overtake.  Such  we  believe  was  pre-eminently  the 
case  with  Jesus ;  and  we  should  have  to  say  it  was  true  of  him 
even  if  it  were  true  of  no  other. x 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  incidents  recorded  in  his 
biography,  the  order  of  events,  the  scene  of  action,  the 
conditioning  circumstances,  all  these  are  of  no  essential 
interest,  and  it  would  change  nothing  to  find  that  they  all 
were  quite  other  than  they  are  represented  to  have  been. 
The  insistence  upon  such  historical  conditions  to  the 
belittling  of  Jesus  betrays  an  intellectual  myopia  that 
misses  the  meaning  of  his  message  to  men  and  reduces 
him  to  a  mediocrity  which  makes  it  impossible  to  account 
for  Christian  history.  If  in  the  Conciliar  dogma  Jesus 
becomes  practically  mere  God  and  is  nothing  to  us,  in 
the  reactionary  humanitarianism  he  becomes  a  mere 
man  and  is  equally  nothing  to  us.  "No  hypothesis  which 
merely  assumes  the  measure  of  a  common  man  will  lead 
us  to  an  existence  which  essentially  transcends  the  level 
of  the  human  series."2  The  humanity  of  Jesus  is  indeed 
to  be  insisted  on,  "not  because  Jesus  was  like  the  rest 
of  humanity,  but  because  the  rest  of  humanity  is  to  become 
like  Jesus."3  Our  thought  of  his  manhood  must  not  be  a 
levelling  down  of  Jesus,  but  a  hope  of  the  levelling  up  of 

1  Mackintosh,  op.  cit.,  73.  a  Keim,  op.  cit.,  ii,  64. 

a  Macfayden,  "Humanity  Measured  by  Jesus  Christ, "  Contemporary 
Review,  August,  1904. 


Catholicism  385 

mankind  to  him.  His  life  is  the  actual  embodiment  of 
the  human  ideal,  the  completion  of  man  as  man,  and  the 
destiny  of  mankind  is  there  portrayed.  One  who  holds 
to  the  ideal  oneness  of  the  human  and  the  divine,  while 
recognising  a  clear  distinction  between  divinity  and 
Deity,  need  not  hesitate  to  take  for  his  own  the  language 
of  the  Te  Deum,  for  he  who  stands  above  us,  unique  in 
realisation  of  "the  highest,  holiest  manhood,"  merits 
no  less  a  title  than  that  of  God's  "adorable,  true  and 
only  Son." 

7.     Asceticism:    Dualism  in  Life 

Men  act  as  they  think ;  a  cast  of  mind,  a  habit  of  thought 
are  influential  in  moulding  life  and  conduct,  and  a  theology 
that  insisted  on  the  fixed  opposition  between  human  and 
divine  could  not  but  lead  to  a  practical  separation  between 
the  Church  and  the  world.  Indeed  it  is  not  too  much  to 
say  that  such  a  separation  is  involved  in  the  idea  of  a 
church,  as  that  idea  became  dominant  in  the  second 
century.  In  early  days  religion  had  been  essentially 
social,  a  relation  to  its  god  of  the  tribe,  or  city-state, 
which  involved  the  relations  of  the  tribesmen  or  citizens 
to  one  another,  and  gave  birth  to  the  rules  of  morality. 
With  the  conquests  of  Rome  the  gods  disappeared  from 
states  and  kingdoms  reduced  to  provinces,  and  now,  as 
long  before  under  similar  conditions,  the  religious  con- 
sciousness sought  refuge  in  the  idea  of  a  direct  relation 
of  the  individual  to  the  Divine,  independent  of  his  rela- 
tions to  political  society.  Now  for  religion  to  become  a 
man's  own  affair,  deepening  his  inward  life,  bringing  him 
to  a  new  self -consciousness, — this  was  surely  an  advance. 
Jesus  too  taught  a  religion  intensely  personal,  but  he 
would  have  it  take  possession  of  the  whole  man,  of  his 
inward  life  and  therefore  of  his  outward  life  as  well,  in 
25 


386  Catholicism 

its  every  aspect  and  relation  and  every  field  of  its  activity. 
Nothing  could  be  more  foreign  to  the  mind  of  Jesus  than 
to  sink  a  gulf  between  the  religious  and  secular  life,  to 
represent  religion  as  constantly  pointing  upward  to  the 
future  and  never  around  upon  the  present,  to  set  the 
church  and  the  world  against  each  other  like  two  hostile 
camps.  The  Gospel  deals  with  the  common  life  of  men, 
and  urges  sincerity,  integrity,  high  motive  in  all  they 
do.  Jesus  distinctly  rejected  for  his  followers  the  ascetic 
teachings  of  the  Baptist.  He  asked  for  no  technical, 
ecclesiastical  virtues,  but  only  for  things  that  are  matters 
of  course  and  which  every  man's  conscience  assents  to. 
All  his  demands  were  for  men  living  and  working  in  the 
world.  Their  religion  was  not  to  be  a  thing  apart,  but 
one  with  daily  life  and  its  pervading  power.  His  own  open 
life  showed  them  how  to  live  among  men  in  touch  with  the 
heavenly  Father,  in  consciousness  of  the  sonship  which 
made  them  brethren,  and  so  in  love  and  kindliness,  in 
peace  and  joy. 

But  that  religion  is  simply  life  is  a  truth  the  world  was 
not  then,  nor  is  it  now,  prepared  to  accept.  At  that 
time  in  the  widespread  Mysteries,  in  the  Synagogues  of 
the  Dispersion,  in  certain  philosophical  Schools  there  was 
to  be  found  a  bond  of  union  for  human  beings  regarded 
from  the  single  point  of  view  of  their  relation  to  God. 
Such  a  union  was  in  principle  a  church,  a  community  of 
the  religious,  in  the  narrow  sense  of  the  term,  in  which  the 
concerns  of  the  spiritual  nature  were  separated  from  all 
the  secular  affairs  of  life.  And  there  was  nothing  in 
devotion  to  the  memory  of  Jesus,  now  that  for  his  wor- 
shippers he  had  ceased  to  be  a  man,  to  make  the  Christian 
organisation  more  than  a  Church,  a  community  taken  out 
of  society  at  large — to  make  Christianity  comprehend 
all  interests  of  life,  secular  and  sacred,  as  the  primitive 
religions  had  done.  It  could  gather  an  aggregate  of 


Catholicism  387 

individuals  united  through  one  supreme  interest,  but  could 
not  mould  them  into  a  social  organism,  since  it  excluded 
all  their  other  interests.  The  more  the  Church  sought  to 
grow,  to  establish  itself,  the  more  it  was  logically  led  to 
treat  the  secular  interests  as  trivial  and  worthless.  It  was 
idle  to  pray  for  the  coming  of  God's  Kingdom  on  earth 
after  that  Kingdom  had  been  transferred  to  heaven. 
This  world  the  Church  looked  on  as  only  a  place  in  which 
to  prepare  for  another,  and  the  preparation  demanded 
withdrawal  from  a  worldly  life.  Its  aim  was  not  to 
sanctify  the  things  of  time  and  sense,  but  to  escape  from 
their  noxious  influence.  By  its  constitutive  idea  the 
Church  was  forced  into  the  path  of  asceticism,  which 
leads  not  to  the  regeneration  of  human  society,  but  to  a 
cloistered  refuge  from  an  evil  world;  and  in  this  mould 
Christianity  was  cast  for  a  thousand  years.  Even  today 
it  is  a  notion  widely  prevalent  that  Christianity  in  its 
ideal  is  an  ascetic  and  world-renouncing  life.  Schopen- 
hauer can  find  nothing  of  worth  in  that  religion  except  its 
holding  up  of  this  ideal,  and  no  Christians  worthy  of  the 
name  but  the  great  ascetics  of  the  medieval  ages.  Tolstoi 
too,  a  far  warmer  and  richer  nature,  will  have  it  that 
Christianity  is  essentially  a  renunciation  of  the  world. 
Such  a  view  of  Christianity  seems  a  strange  delusion,  if 
Christianity  is  to  mean  the  religion  that  Jesus  brought 
into  the  world.  The  student  of  its  history  will  find  that 
the  ascetic  principles  which  took  possession  of  the  Christian 
Church  have  their  source  not  in  the  Gospel,  but  in  alien 
influences  which  overcame  and  set  aside  the  Gospel 
teachings. 

Slight  traces  of  the  ascetic  tendency  may  be  found  in  the 
early  Christian  communities,  induced  by  their  sense  of 
opposition  to  the  hostile  pagan  world,  and  by  the  over- 
shadowing Messianic  expectation  which  bade  them  use 
the  things  of  this  world  as  though  they  used  them  not, 


388  Catholicism 

for  the  time  was  short.  The  feeling  that  Christians 
should  not  hamper  themselves  with  ephemeral  domestic 
ties  leads  Paul  to  speak  of  marriage  itself  in  disparaging 
terms,  with  the  logical  implication  that  celibacy  is  the 
holier  state.1  On  the  other  hand  the  Pastorals  strongly 
condemn  the  ascetic  practices  probably  introduced  by 
gnostic  teachers.2  It  was  in  the  Montanist  reaction 
against  the  growing  worldliness  of  the  Church  that 
Asceticism  in  its  extremer  form  made  its  first  appearance, 
and  although  the  Church  on  other  grounds  broke  with 
Montanism  and  pronounced  it  heresy,  it  did  not  part  with 
the  ascetic  ideal  which  had  been  set  before  it.  A  perfect 
Christian  life  was  to  be  sought  in  voluntary  poverty, 
celibacy,  a  discipline  of  privation,  and  the  mortification 
of  the  flesh.  Such  an  ideal  is  plainly  an  exotic,  not  a 
native  growth  of  Christianity.  It  came  to  Phrygia 
from  the  remoter  East.  It  was  the  offspring  of  that 
Oriental  Dualism  which  viewed  the  material  universe  as 
the  creation  of  a  being  hostile  to  the  spirit  of  goodness; 
whence  the  inherent  evilness  of  matter  and  the  consequent 
sinf ulness  of  every  corporeal  instinct.  Neo-Platonism, 
Hellenic  in  structure  but  touched  with  the  Oriental 
influences  affecting  the  mind  of  the  third  century,  adopted 
these  conceptions  and  gave  them  a  wide  currency  among 
people  of  Hellenic  education.  "Much  in  the  life  of  St. 
Anthony  might  have  been  based  on  teachings  of  Plotinus 
and  Porphyry  whose  ethics  laid  such  stress  on  the  purifica- 
tion of  the  soul  from  the  contamination  of  matter  and  the 
ties  of  sense."3  This  dualistic  asceticism  was  also  carried 
to  the  West  in  the  advance  of  Manichaeism.  In  North 
Africa  that  religious  system  gained  numerous  adherents, 
and  it  never  wholly  lost  its  influence  upon  the  creative 
mind  that  shaped  the  thought  of  Latin  Christianity. 

1 1  Cor.  vii.  a  I  Tim.  iv,  1-8. 

3  Taylor,  The  Classical  Heritage  of  the  Middle  Ages,  139. 


Catholicism  389 

Intellectually  a  huge  blunder,  asceticism  is  morally  a 
radical  vice.  In  aim  and  motive  ascetism  is  pure  selfish- 
ness. "No  one  of  us  liveth  to  himself,"  writes  the 
Apostle,  but  it  is  wholly  to  himself  that  the  ascetic  lives. 
His  abstentions  and  renunciations  are  not  for  the  sake  of 
others,  but  for  his  own  sake.  They  are  the  price  he  pays 
for  the  bliss  of  heaven ;  he  believes  that  a  choice  is  offered 
him  between  temporal  and  eternal  good  and  he  chooses 
sagaciously.  His  is  not  the  sacrifice  of  self  for  the  world, 
but  a  sacrifice  of  the  world  for  self.  It  is  an  anxious 
effort  to  save  his  own  soul,  and  this  too  is  a  blunder:  no 
soul  is  saved  in  that  way.  With  all  the  beauty  of  its 
mystic  feeling  this  spiritual  selfishness  is  the  keynote  of 
the  famous  manual  of  the  Middle  Ages.  It  has  been  said 
that 

never  was  misnomer  so  glaring  as  the  title  of  the  book,  The 
Imitation  of  Christ.  That  which  distinguishes  Christ  and  his 
religion,  the  love  of  man,  is  absolutely  left  out.  It  begins 
in  self  and  it  ends  in  self.  Let  the  world  perish,  it  seems  to 
say,  so  the  single  soul  can  escape  on  its  solitary  plank  from  the 
general  wreck.  .  .  .  Our  religion  to  be  itself  again  must  shake 
off  not  merely  the  vices  but  the  virtues  of  monastic  Chris- 
tianity. x 

And  yet  that  the  Protestant  idea  of  personal  religion  was 
here  at  one  with  medievalism  we  may  read  in  the  Pil- 
grim's Progress,  where  Christian  sets  forth  alone,  regard- 
less of  his  wife  and  children  left  behind  in  the  City  of 
Destruction.  Between  monkish  and  apostolic  Chris- 
tianity the  contrast  is  indeed  evident:  the  one  would 
abjure  the  worldly  life,  the  other  worldliness  of  heart; 
the  one  counts  it  saintliness,  the  other  counts  it  sin  to  be 
without  natural  affection;  the  one  draws  a  rigid  line 
between  the  sexes  as  between  hostile  races  that  cannot 

1  Milman,  History  of  Latin  Christianity,  viii,  300. 


390  Catholicism 

approximate,  the  other  unites  men  and  women  in  the 
fellowship  of  the  Christian  household;  the  one  would 
paralyse  the  body,  the  other  would  keep  it  under;  the  one 
would  suppress  human  nature  itself,  the  other  would 
overcome  the  evil  in  it;  the  one  is  a  religion  of  fear,  the 
other  of  the  love  that  casts  out  fear.  Nothing  is  plainer 
than  the  Gospel's  inculcation  of  a  thoroughly  positive 
morality  in  which  "thou  shalt  not "  becomes  "thou  shalt, " 
and  its  insistence  upon  inwardness  and  spontaneity  of 
individual  action  as  against  the  passive  virtue  trained  by  a 
policy  of  restrictive  regulation.  It  would  seem  that  the 
teachings  of  Jesus  must  have  been  utterly  forgotten,  and 
the  Evangelist's  picture  of  the  judgment  faded  from 
memory,  before  an  ethic  of  privation  and  restraint,  an 
ethic  of  negation,  could  obtain  such  dominance  in  the 
Christian  world. x  There  could  be  no  completer  perversion 
of  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  than  to  turn  the  soul's  energies  into 
channels  of  apathy,  suppression,  abnegation, — ignoring 
life's  realities  and  abandoning  earth's  duties  in  the  quest 
of  an  empty  egoistic  spirituality.  The  Master  must  have 
looked  with  a  pitying  wonder  upon  his  misguided  disciple 
"renouncing"  the  world,  fleeing  to  the  cloister  from  a 
social  disorder  that  called  for  the  best  energies  of  men  to 
set  aright,  seeking  to  propitiate  the  throne  of  grace  by  a 
petty  round  of  religious  practices  while,  cut  off  from 
converse  in  the  sweet  charities  of  life,  he  was  neglecting 
utterly  the  "new  commandment"  given  to  the  Christian. 
Looking  back  to  the  apostolic  age,  to  the  missionary 
enthusiasm  that  fired  the  souls  of  the  first  Christians  and 
sent  them  forth  to  evangelise  the  world,  we  feel  that 
monasticism  was  a  confession  that  Christianity  had  been  a 
failure,  that  its  aims  were  not  to  be  realised.  But  whether 
it  was  in  despair  or  in  perversity  it  is  plain  that  the  monk 
forsook  his  faith  to  follow  strange  gods. 
1  Matthew  xxv,  31-46. 


Catholicism  391 

And  the  dualistic  delusion  carried  the  ascetic  far.  For 
him  the  body  was  an  enemy  to  be  fought  down  fiercely. 
Or  it  was  the  prison  of  the  soul,  not  its  house,  and  the 
conditions  of  its  life  chains  to  be  broken  by  fastings  and 
scourgings,  by  all  the  grotesque  agonies  a  fanatic's  in- 
genuity could  devise  to  stifle  the  natural  throb  of  pulse  or 
nerve  which  his  perverted  mind  took  to  be  a  sin  against 
the  God  who  had  made  him  what  he  was.  It  was  hard  to 
maintain  the  battle  against  flesh  and  sense  amidst  the 
distractions  and  temptations  of  the  city;  the  wiser  course 
was  to  "withdraw"  (dtva/wpeiv)  altogether  from  the  world, 
and  soon  the  self -exiled  anchorites  sought  refuge  in  dismal 
solitudes  of  the  East,  and  a  nearer  communion  with 
God  by  desertion  of  their  fellow-creatures. 

But  the  solitary  life  is  beyond  the  strength  of  ordinary 
men.  In  utter  isolation  from  one's  kind  it  is  not  less 
difficult  to  retain  the  mental  balance  than  it  is  to  find 
provision  for  bodily  needs,  and  after  a  few  years  in  his 
lonely  hermitage  it  is  doubtful  if  the  occupant  would  be 
found  entirely  sane.  And  so  anchorites  tended  to  become 
cenobites,  to  gather  for  mutual  aid  and  intercourse  into 
communities,  and  to  formulate  regulations  under  which  to 
live.  The  earliest  of  these  regulated  communities  was 
founded  in  the  last  years  of  the  third  century  by  one 
Pachomius,  an  ascetic  before  he  was  a  Christian,  and  from 
the  banks  of  the  Nile  the  monastic  system  made  its  way 
to  Europe,  where  it  met  with  the  ardent  advocacy  of 
Jerome,  Ambrose,  and  Augustine.1  In  course  of  time 
monasteries  were  established  in  great  numbers  in  all 
Christian  lands,  and  the  love  of  idleness,  the  remorse  of 
the  criminal,  the  distress  of  the  pauper  swelled  the  ranks 
of  the  devotees  of  the  religious  life. 

The  deepest  pitfall,  the  most  dangerous  snare  of  the 

1  The  ascetic  enthusiasm  of  Jerome  finds  expression  in  his  letter  to 
Heliodorus — Epistle  xiv. 


392  Catholicism 

devil  that  haunted  the  mind  of  the  ascetic  was  sexual 
desire.  In  vain  he  fled  from  the  haunts  of  men ;  he  could 
not  flee  from  himself.  The  passions  outlived  the  macera- 
tion of  the  body,  and  his  disordered  fancy  peopled  the 
desert  or  the  monastery  cell  with  insistent  tempters  of 
alluring  beauty  bent  on  the  ruin  of  his  soul . 

Any  one  reading  much  patristic  writing  is  astonished  at 
the  extent  to  which  the  struggle  with  fleshly  lust  filled  the 
thoughts  and  occupied  the  strength  of  the  Fathers.  Anthony 
struggling  with  filthy  demons  is  not  unrepresentative  of  the 
general  state  of  the  Church.  Christians  had  to  writhe  them- 
selves free  from  their  lusts.1 

"A  saint,"  it  has  been  said  without  much  exaggeration, 
"appears  to  be  a  person  of  no  ordinary  degree  of  natural 
viciousness  and  a  preternatural  violence  of  animal  passion 
whose  sanctity  mainly  consists  in  the  curious  and  far- 
fetched ingenuity  of  the  torments  by  which  he  contrives  to 
keep  himself  within  the  bounds  of  decency."  Yet  such 
efforts  were  on  the  whole  unsuccessful,  and  in  the  end  the 
monasteries  sank  into  the  fleshly  vices  they  made  such 
strenuous  endeavor  to  escape  and  became  notorious  for 
gluttony,  drunkenness,  and  debauchery.2  Even  worse 
was  the  effect  of  the  monk's  unnatural  life  to  narrow  the 
mind,  to  harden  the  heart,  to  stifle  all  kindly  sympathies, 

1  Taylor,  The  Classical  Hermitage  of  the  Middle  Ages,  145. 

3  Ctemangis,  the  eminent  theologian,  is  one  witness  out  of  many:  "Si 
quis  hodie  desidiosus  est,  si  quis  a  labore  abhorrens,  si  quis  in  otio  luxuriate 
volens,  ad  sacerdotium  convolat,  quo  adepto,  statim  se  caeteris  sacerdotibus 
voluptatum  sectatoribus  adjungit,  qui  magis  secundum  Epicurum  quam 
secundum  Christum  viventes,  et  cauponulas  seduli  frequentantes,  potando, 
commessando,  pransitando,  convivando  cum  tesseris  et  pila  ludendo 
tempora  tota  consumnunt.  .  .  .  Quid  aliud  sunt  hoc  tempore  puellarum 
monasteria  nisi  quaedam  non  dico  Dei  sanctuaria,  sed  Veneris  execranda 
prostibula,  sed  lascivorum  et  impudicorurn  juvenum  ad  libidines  explendas 
receptacula?  ut  idem  sit  hodie  puellam  velare  quod  et  publice  ad  scortandum 
exponere." 


Catholicism  393 

till  the  recluse  became  a  cold,  unfeeling  bigot,  callous  to 
the  softer  emotions,  dehumanised  of  every  genial  impulse, 
defiantly  unscrupulous  in  defense  of  the  interests  of  his 
order,  and  unsparing  in  cruelties  visited  upon  those  he 
deemed  the  enemies  of  his  faith.  Hypatia,  murdered  by 
the  ferocious  monks  of  Nitria,  was  but  the  first  of  many 
victims  of  the  pitiless  monastic  piety. 

It  marked  the  ascendancy  of  ascetic  ideas  that  "religion" 
came  to  signify  the  monastic  life  and  rule,  and  secular 
whatever  was  outside  the  monastic  life  and  rule.1  Al- 
though troubled  by  continual  friction  between  the  monks 
and  the  secular  clergy,  the  Church  was  obliged  to  authorise 
the  anomaly  of  the  monastic  system,  whose  Rule  of  strict 
discipline  made  amends  for  its  own  laxity,  while  the  dense 
fanaticism  of  its  votaries  made  them  useful  auxiliaries  in 
quarrels  with  feudal  lords,  and  offered  a  ready  instrument 
for  the  perpetration  of  any  violence.  To  accept  the 
ascetic  principle,  however,  to  point  to  the  monastery 
or  the  hermitage  for  the  normal  type  of  the  religious  life 
was  to  encounter  a  difficulty.  The  Rule  of  Faith  declared 
the  Church  to  be  both  holy  and  Catholic,  but  if  this  was 
holiness  it  was  evident  that  a  Catholic  Church  could  not 
be  altogether  a  holy  one.  The  uncompromising  Montan- 
ists  had  taken  stand  for  holiness  at  all  costs,  but  the 
extension  of  the  Church  and  its  dominion  over  the  world 
formed  the  paramount  consideration  in  the  mind  of  its 
leaders,  and  to  this  end  the  great  opportunist  party  found 
it  necessary  to  lower  the  strict  moral  standards  of  earlier 
days  and  to  legitimise  an  average  morality  which  it  was 
not  too  hard  to  live  by.  It  was  not  an  escape  from  the 
dilemma — either  holy  or  Catholic — but  only  an  attempt 
to  make  the  best  of  it,  when  the  theory  was  adopted  of  a 
double  morality, — the  lower,  binding  upon  all  Christians, 
and  the  higher,  recommended  to  those  who  sought  perfec- 

1  Hatch,  Organisation  of  the  early  Christian  Churches,  161,  note. 


394  Catholicism 

tion.  Thus  the  distinction  between  the  Church  and  the 
world  on  the  ground  of  holiness  now  became  one  within 
the  Church  itself.  The  monastic  life  alone  was  the  true 
"vita  religiosa, "  and  henceforth  the  monks  remained 
the  elite  of  the  Church,  the  representatives  of  its  ideal  of 
sanctity — an  ideal  the  layman  was  not  expected  to  attain. 
It  was  the  same  distinction  as  that  between  the  Law- 
worshipping  Pharisees  and  the  people  of  the  land,  knowing 
not  the  Law  and  cursed.  As  the  Jewish  Law  pronounced 
the  mass  of  the  people  "sinners"  because  the  activities 
of  daily  life  rendered  it  impossible  for  them  to  comply 
with  its  minute  exactions,  so  a  conception  of  religion 
which  made  it  at  its  highest  an  abandonment  of  the  world, 
and  condemned  all  ordinary  life  as  irreligious,  involved 
a  like  disparagement  of  ordinary  Christians.  In  one  of 
his  Essays  Pfleiderer  tells  of  a  picture  that  made  a  strong 
impression  upon  the  young  Luther.  It  represented  the 
Church  as  a  great  ship  sailing  heavenward  with  only 
priests  and  monks  for  passengers  while  the  laity  were 
struggling  in  the  waves,  some  clinging  to  ropes  thrown  to 
them  from  the  ship,  but  many  more  drowning  helplessly  in 
the  sea  of  worldly  life.  Thus  the  Church  returned  by  way 
of  the  far  East  to  the  position  of  the  self-righteous  Phari- 
sees, and  discarded  the  morality  of  Jesus  which  is  at 
every  point  the  contradiction  of  Pharisaic — or  as  the 
word  means,  Separatist — piety. 

The  antithesis  between  Church  and  world,  spiritual 
and  temporal,  sacred  and  profane  made  impossible  any 
wholesome  influence  of  religion  upon  social  life,  and 
indeed  the  Church  soon  took  stand  in  direct  opposition 
to  social  morality  at  three  essential  points.  In  the  first 
place,  to  earn  one's  own  living  is  the  duty  of  a  self-respect- 
ing man.  "If  one  will  not  work  neither  shall  he  eat"  is 
the  dictum  of  the  Apostle.  Productive  labor  secures 
personal  independence ;  we  speak  of  one  who  has  acquired 


Catholicism  395 

a  sufficiency  for  his  support  as  a  man  of  independent 
means.  So  with  society;  the  backward  races  are  poor; 
the  accumulated  wealth  of  a  people  is  the  material  basis  of 
its  higher  civilisation.  The  religious  life  was  ordered  on 
other  principles.  It  was  mainly  passed  in  a  mechanical 
routine  of  prayers  and  services,  in  contemplative  idleness 
and  dreams  of  heaven.  Property  must  be  made  over  to 
the  Church;  in  one's  own  hands  it  was  a  snare  to  the  soul,  a 
lure  to  perdition,  and  the  true  saint  was  a  pauper  and 
a  mendicant. 

In  the  next  place,  society  depends  for  its  soundness 
and  efficiency  upon  the  intelligence  and  capability  of  its 
individual  members  and  their  personal  initiative.  To  this 
all  history  is  witness :  for  instance,  it  was  the  lack  of  such 
free  individuality  that  made  the  weakness  of  Eastern 
despotisms  and  explains  the  overthrow  of  the  Persian 
hosts  by  the  little  Greek  democracies.  But  the  first 
thing  demanded  of  the  monk  was  the  surrender  of  his 
individuality.  He  was  not  to  think  or  act  for  himself; 
he  must  renounce  his  own  will  and  way  and  walk  accord- 
ing to  the  judgment  and  bidding  of  another.  Implicit 
obedience  is  his  first  duty,  and  for  the  monastery  the 
necessary  condition  of  its  existence.  His  superiors  are 
for  him  God's  representatives;  what  they  command  is  in 
effect  divinely  ordered  and  to  refuse  obedience  is  deadly 
sin.  The  principle  of  obedience  is  enforced  by  the  Regula, 
a  definite  law  ordering  the  days  and  hours  of  his  life,  so 
that  in  carrying  out  its  detailed  prescriptions  he  may 
know  that  he  is  always  obeying.  Like  Samson,  captive 
in  the  hands  of  the  Philistines,  human  individuality  entered 
the  monastery  shorn  of  its  strength  to  become  a  blind 
slave  in  a  treadmill. 

Finally,  the  foundation  of  social  welfare  is  the  Home. 
Though  the  corruption  of  the  Roman  Empire  has  been 
greatly  exaggerated,  sexual  immorality  was  widely  pre- 


396  Catholicism 

valent  in  the  days  of  its  decline.  The  Church  Fathers 
sternly  condemned  it,  but  they  did  not  look  for  a  remedy 
in  the  elevation  of  marriage  and  the  fostering  of  family 
life.  Far  from  raising  marriage  to  the  level  of  the  Chris- 
tian demands,  their  prurient  misconception  of  the  normal 
relations  between  the  sexes  degraded  it  to  a  kind  of 
licensed  immorality.  Even  Paul,  when  he  speaks  of  it 
as  something  that  might  be  grudgingly  allowed  the 
Christian,  but  which  he  would  do  better  to  avoid,  shows 
that  he  takes  the  lowest  view  of  marriage.1  From  his 
utterances  the  step  was  short  to  the  ascetic  doctrine  that 
true  holiness  lay  only  in  virginity,  and  hence  the  higher 
law  demanded  the  celibacy  of  the  clergy. 2  Thus  one 
most  holy  form  of  human  love  was  banned  and  banished 
from  the  perfect  Christian  life;  and  with  it  too  the  natural 
affections  springing  from  the  ties  of  blood.  The  father's 
love,  the  mother's,  could  not  be  known  to  monk  or  nun, 
and  that  of  son  and  daughter,  brother  and  sister  must  be 
renounced  or  sternly  held  in  check,  for  these,  though  free 
from  sensual  taint,  tended  to  distract  the  soul  that  should 
be  wholly  devoted  to  seeking  its  own  salvation.  Here 
and  everywhere  Monasticism  seems  an  illustration  of  the 
text:  "He  that  will  save  his  soul  shall  lose  it." 

When  the  monk  condemned  the  relations  of  the  family 
and  the  state  as  unfit  for  the  spiritual  man,  he  was  flying  in 
the  face  of  eternal  law,  of  the  divine  will  as  written  in  human 

1  "If  they  cannot  contain  let  them  marry,  for  it  is  better  to  marry  than 
to  burn."    I  Cor.  vii,  9. 

2  "Jerome  wrote  enthusiastic  and  extravagant  letters  to  his  admirers, 
urging  the  virgin  life  which  he  himself  led,  whether  in  Rome  among  adoring 
women  or  in  his  cell  in  Palestine  where  he  also  counselled  and  directed." 
Taylor,  op.  cit.,  159. 

To  the  fancies  that  fastened  a  stigma  upon  nature,  and  the  exaggerated 
value  of  sexual  continence,  may  be  traced  the  legends  of  the  virgin-birth 
of  Buddha  and  the  Christ.  Nature  being  inherently  evil  and  all  her  ways 
unclean,  a  divine  being  could  only  have  a  supernatural  origin. 


Catholicism  397 

constitutions.  His  contempt  for  marriage  as  a  hindrance  to 
grace  may  be  regarded  as  the  act  of  one  who  knew  not  what 
he  did,  but  it  was  none  the  less  an  offence  against  God  and 
man.  Its  punishment  may  be  seen  to  have  grown  in  this 
case  directly  out  of  its  nature,  for  they  who  aimed  at  purity 
became  the  scandal  of  the  age  for  impurity;  striving  to  be 
something  above  men,  they  fell  below  men  and  degraded  the 
human  ideal. x 

It  is  a  commonplace  of  our  chequered  human  life  that 
nothing  evil  is  wholly  unmixed  with  good.  That  the 
better  monasteries  in  their  better  days  were  of  service 
to  civilisation  in  keeping  alive  through  ages  of  darkness 
some  smoky  flame  of  intellectual  light,  some  feeble  activi- 
ty of  the  artistic  impulse,  and  in  other  ways  as  well,  no  one 
will  venture  to  deny.  Yet  none  but  a  partisan  will 
venture  to  assert  that  the  balance  between  good  and  evil 
inclines  in  favor  of  Monasticism.  History  exhibits  the 
disastrous  effect  of  its  false  principles  upon  personal  and 
social  life,  and  a  glance  at  that  history  is  enough  to  show 
how  the  type  of  Christian  character  was  distorted  and 
how  the  claims  of  social  duty  were  set  aside  by  the  Three 
Vows  of  the  religious  life — Poverty,  Chastity,  Obedience 
— by  which,  as  Hegel  says,  "The  socially  immoral  received 
the  stamp  of  consecration." 

8.     The  Church  as  Mediator 

It  is  another  remark  of  Hegel's  that  the  unity  of  man 
with  God,  which  is  the  heart  of  the  Gospel  revelation, 
"is  not  to  be  superficially  conceived,  as  if  man,  immedi- 
ately and  without  further  condition,  were  divine."  God 
is  Spirit,  and  man  too  is  spirit,  or  as  the  poet  says:  "A 
god  is  germ."  In  germ — in  potency;  he  has  to  become 
spirit,  become  his  true  self,  and  his  life  is  this  becoming. 

1  Allen,  Christian  Institutions,  171. 


398  Catholicism 

The  immediate  unity  of  man  with  God  is  therefore  an 
unreality  and  its  realisation  comes  through  a  process  of 
internal  mediation,  or  self -mediation.  Man's  divine  na- 
ture is  the  ideal  truth  of  his  being  which  has  to  be  realised 
in  his  consciousness  and  life.  And  let  no  man  take  it 
easily,  as  though  somehow  eventually  it  will  realise  itself. 
Paulinism  speaks  of  the  "fruits  of  the  Spirit, "  but  growth 
unto  a  perfect  man  has  no  analogy  with  the  peaceful 
growth  of  a  plant;  it  is  a  difficult  self -conquest.  It  is 
the  goal  to  be  attained  by  a  man's  own  striving,  by  the 
dominance  his  higher  nature  wins  over  the  lower,  for, 

Unless  above  himself  he  can  erect  himself, 
How  poor  a  thing  is  man. 

Here  then,  it  cannot  be  too  often  repeated,  is  a  man's  own 
work;  he  cannot  delegate  it  to  another;  no  other  can  do  it 
for  him.  Yet  he  is  not  alone,  for  the  Father  is  with  him : 
' '  Work  out  your  own  salvation,  for  it  is  God  that  worketh 
in  you  to  will  and  to  do."  All  this  is  in  the  teaching  of 
Jesus,  who  makes  the  first  step  in  the  spiritual  life  the 
metanoia — the  turning  from  the  lower  self,  the  turning 
to  God. 

As  we  have  seen,  Paul's  anthropology  does  not  admit  the 
metanoia.  Man  is  helpless  and  hopeless  in  his  alienation 
from  the  divine,  and  the  work  of  mediation  is  done  for 
him  by  the  Christ.  When  however  the  humanity  of  the 
"One  Mediator,  the  man  Christ  Jesus"  vanished  from  the 
eyes  of  men, — when,  as  at  the  Ascension,  he  was  taken 
up  into  heaven  and  a  cloud  received  him  out  of  their 
sight,  then  the  Church  assumed  the  r61e  and  functions 
of  the  Mediator.  Given  the  dualistic  preconception,  the 
fixed  opposition  of  human  and  divine,  and  then  the  free 
access  of  the  personal  soul  to  God,  which  for  Jesus  was 
the  simplest  reality,  becomes  impossible,  and  a  system  of 


Catholicism  399 

external  mediation  to  bridge  the  gulf  between  earth  and 
heaven  a  necessity. 

The  Latin  mind  was  ungifted  with  originative  capacity 
for  speculation,  and  the  theology  it  took  over  from  the 
Greeks,  though  coloured  by  the  Latin  temperament  and 
reset  in  juristic  phrase,  remained  for  it  a  matter  of  second- 
ary interest.1  The  metaphysical  questions  that  con- 
cerned the  Greek  Councils  soon  ceased  to  be  living  issues 
in  the  Western  Church,  for  Christian  Rome  was  the  child 
of  ancient  Rome  in  its  inherited  propensity  to  establish 
an  organisation  for  governing  mankind,  and  its  theological 
activity  was  directed  to  matters  more  germane  to  its 
practical  genius  and  the  juridical  training  of  its  leading 
minds — sin,  grace,  and  means  of  grace,  the  constitution 
of  the  Church,  its  order  and  discipline,  the  organisation 
and  authority  of  the  priesthood,  the  relations  of  clergy 
and  laity.  In  the  Roman  view  the  dogmatic  Creed  did 
not  stand  as  in  itself  the  power  of  salvation,  but  salvation 
was  in  the  power  of  the  Church  as  possessor  of  the  Creed 
and  the  Sacraments.  The  Church  with  its  sacerdotal 
system  and  its  spectacular  worship  held  the  first  place 
in  the  religious  life  of  the  masses,  while  theology  was  re- 
legated to  the  learned  few,  and  in  the  system  of  Augustine 
furnished  the  doctrinal  code  of  ecclesiastical  absolutism. 
Thus  Christianity  took  a  different  course  in  the  West 
from  that  taken  in  the  East.  Under  Greek  influence 
faith  was  changed  from  allegiance  to  Christ  and  the 
following  of  Christ  to  acceptance  of  what  one  was  taught 
concerning  the  kind  of  person  he  was ;  under  the  influence 
of  Rome  the  thing  requiring  acceptance  was  rather  the 
ordinances  of  organised  clerical  authority.  The  Roman 
contribution  to  the  development,  or  the  transformation, 

1  Honorius  I  in  a  letter  to  the  Patriarch  of  Constantinople  deprecated 
the  dangerous  subtleties  of  Trinitarian  controversy,  observing  that  such 
inquiries  were  matter  for  grammarians  rather  than  Christians. 


400  Catholicism 

of  primitive  Christianity  was  to  substitute  the  Church  for 
Christ  as  the  Greeks  had  displaced  him  by  the  Creed. 

And  the  Roman  character  was  of  a  sort  to  make  this 
substitution  effectively  complete.  Religion  in  the  early 
days  of  men's  undeveloped  intellect  was  wholly  an  affair 
of  ritual.  By  the  performance  of  certain  rites,  simpler  or 
more  elaborate,  the  community  sought  to  maintain  a 
bond  of  union  with  its  god,  or  to  propitiate  the  dim  un- 
earthly powers  in  whose  hands  lay  the  lives  and  fortunes 
of  men.  Everywhere  worship  was  an  outward  form,  but 
nowhere  was  the  temper  of  formalism  more  pronounced  and 
rigid  than  in  the  old  Roman  religion.  There  the  opus 
operatum,  which  was  the  solely  important  thing,  was  a 
thing  of  vast  importance.  To  avert  the  wrath  or  win  the 
favor  of  the  gods  everything  depended  upon  scrupulous 
exactness  in  following  the  prescribed  forms  of  the  cere- 
monial in  their  minutest  detail;  the  dress  of  the  officials, 
their  posture  and  gestures  must  be  in  strict  accordance 
with  ancient  precedent,  and  the  utmost  care  was  necessary 
in  reciting  formulas  wherein  words  had  in  themselves 
an  operative  virtue  which  was  lost  if  one  word  were 
substituted  for  another.  It  is  said  that  on  one  occasion 
a  sacrifice  had  to  be  repeated  thirty  times  on  account 
of  slight  mistakes  committed  in  its  performance.1  Te- 
naciously conservative  of  primitive  tradition,  the  Romans 
went  on  celebrating  their  rites  of  the  old  religion  down 
to  the  later  days  of  the  Empire  (we  have  noted  the 
recitation  of  the  Salian  Litany  by  Marcus  Aurelius), 
for  it  was  still  believed  that  the  safety  of  the  State  hung 
upon  the  due  observance  of  the  ritual  practices  handed 
down  from  antiquity.  It  mattered  not  that  the  Pontifex 
Maximus  was  known  to  be  a  skeptic  so  long  as  he  performed 
the  right  ceremonies  in  the  right  way.  The  old  faith  was 
dead  in  the  hearts  of  the  people,  but  the  respect  for  out- 

1  Mommsen,  History  of  Rome,  iii,  HI. 


Catholicism  401 

ward  observance  retained  all  its  old  strength.  No  people 
have  shown  themselves  so  indifferent  to  the  spirit  of 
religion  and  so  insistent  upon  the  form.  This  supreme 
regard  for  the  outward  and  formal  was  carried  over  into 
the  Roman  Church,  and  the  ritual  of  Christian  service 
came  to  be  treated  as  the  State-religion  had  been  treated. 
The  efficacy  of  a  sacrament  was  nowise  impaired  by  the 
doubtful  character  of  the  celebrant ;  the  office  covered  his 
personal  un worthiness.  The  ceremonial  was  all  in  all; 
the  devotional  spirit  which  had  sought  expression  in 
common  worship  was  allowed  to  languish  and  expire,  and 
the  materialism  of  the  old  religions  crept  in  and  rooted 
itself  in  Christianity. 

The  formalism  or  externalism  which  was  so  marked  a 
trait  of  Roman  character  appears  in  another  connection. 
The  Roman  conception  of  morality  had  sole  regard  to  the 
deed  done,  not  to  the  doer,  and  made  right  doing  mainly 
consist  in  docile  conformity  to  the  laws.  When  a  refor- 
mation of  morals  was  contemplated  by  Augustus  the  only 
means  of  effecting  it  seemed  to  be  the  passing  of  special 
laws  for  the  purpose.  Horace  places  all  reliance  on  this 
method  of  action.  He  does  not  believe  men  capable  of 
reforming  themselves  or  of  following  good  advice,  and  so 
recourse  must  be  had  to  the  compulsion  of  law.1  In 
this  view  of  morality  as  a  legal  responsibility  the  similarity 
is  apparent  of  the  Hebraic  and  the  Roman  cast  of  mind. 
The  Jewish  Christianity  dominant  in  the  Church  of  Rome 
was  of  a  kind  congenial  to  the  Roman  temperament. 
Religion  as  conceived  by  Pharisees  and  Sadducees  com- 
mended itself  to  a  people  who  themselves  were  legalists 
and  ritualists  from  native  bias  and  long  training,  and 
Pharisaic  and  Roman  ideas  of  law  and  morals  combined 
to  lead  the  Christian  communities  back  to  the  nomistic 
religion  from  which  Jesus  and  Paul  had  sought  to  set  men 

1  Ferrero,  The  Greatness  and  Decline  of  Rome,  iv,  154. 
26 


4°2  Catholicism 

free.  At  every  point  the  Gospel  principle  of  inwardness 
and  personal  activity  was  set  aside  in  the  Catholic  return 
to  the  old  externalism.  x  The  Christian's  moral  life  was 
no  longer  the  following  of  Christ,  but  his  feet  were  guided 
by  the  sign-posts  of  communal  regulation;  his  worship 
became  attendance  at  a  spectacle,  as  the  Jew's  had  been 
a  looking  on  at  the  Temple  sacrifice;  and  his  faith,  no 
longer  the  inspiration  of  a  life,  sank  to  a  passive  or  nega- 
tive attitude  of  mind — the  not  dissenting  from  Church 
teaching. 

And  so  the  individual  withered,  and  the  Church  was 
more  and  more.  In  the  early  day  faith  in  the  Redeemer 
Christ  and  a  loving  allegiance  had  drawn  the  Christian 
into  brotherly  fellowship  with  others  likeminded  with 
himself.  The  Church  was  the  association  of  the  faithful ; 
that  is,  it  was  first  the  Christian,  then  the  Church.  Now 
the  sequence  was  reversed  and  it  became  the  established 
principle  that  the  Christian  could  hold  no  relation  to  his 
Lord  except  through  the  Church  and  as  a  member  of  the 
Church. 2  This  seems  a  revival  of  the  primitive  religious 
idea  that  only  as  a  clansman,  not  as  an  individual,  one 
was  related  to  the  god  of  the  clan.  The  Church  however 
was  something  more  than  the  clan,  and  other  than  the 


1  Of  this  a  story  told  of  Robert  of  Paris  offers  striking  illustration . 
Concerned  at  the  frequency  of  perjury  by  witnesses  who  swore  upon  the 
sacred  relics,  the  Count  secretly  emptied  the  reliquary,  satisfied  that  thus 
he  would  relieve  those  who  took  oath  in  future  from  incurring  the  guilt  of 
their  intended  crime. 

2  This  principle  it  was  that  crushed  the  proto-martyr  of  the  Reformation. 
The  capital  point  in  the  prosecution  of  Jeanne   Dare  was  her  claim  to 
personal  inspiration  and  divine  direction,  which  stamped  her  as  a  heretic 
and  schismatic.     To  the  question,  Did  she  not  acknowledge  herself  subject 
to  the  Church  of  God  on  earth,  her  reply  was  that  first  and  above  all  she 
owed  obedience  to  God  Himself.     It  was  the  reassertion  of  the  Gospel 
principle,  the  spirit's  free  communion  with  the  Divine,  for  which  Luther  was 
to  contend  successfully  eighty-six  years  later.     See  Michelet,  Histoire 
de  France,  vi,  246-248,  and  G.  Hanotaux,  Jeanne  d'Arc,  300-309. 


Catholicism  403 

corporate  unity  of  its  members.  Cyprian's  dictum, 
Extra  ecclesiam  nulla  salus  was  a  logical  deduction  from 
the  accepted  premises;  sinful  man  is  saved  only  by  the 
grace  of  God,  and  the  Church  is  sole  custodian  of  divine 
grace  and  trustee  for  its  distribution;  hence  all  salvation 
of  men  depends  upon  their  outward  communion  with  the 
Church,  which  takes  the  place  of  inward  communion  with 
God.  This  salvation  is  no  longer  the  winning  of  a  char- 
acter "worked  out"  by  moral  struggle,  but  escape  from 
future  torment  and  the  obtaining  of  pleasant  quarters 
in  another  world.  And  this  communion  with  the  Church 
means  simply  entire  submission  to  clerical  authority.  For 
in  its  mediatorial  capacity  the  Church  means  the  Clergy. 
To  their  hands  are  committed  the  indispensable  "means 
of  grace,"  the  deposit  of  the  saving  faith,  and  the  ad- 
ministration of  the  saving  ordinances,  and  in  their  power 
to  grant  or  withhold  absolution  and  the  sacraments  they 
hold  the  keys  of  heaven  and  hell. 

The  Church  in  this  new  sense,  the  Church  from  which 
the  laity  is  excluded,  claims  all  spiritual  insight  and 
knowledge  of  divine  things,  and  to  it  the  development  of 
doctrine  exclusively  belongs.  Christian  truth  is  pro- 
mulgated in  dogmas  shaped  by  Councils  of  Bishops; 
they  determine  and  ordain  and  the  laity  has  simply  to 
accept  on  faith — faith  without  insight,  and  acceptance  is 
enforced  by  the  rack  and  the  stake.  In  the  view  of 
Catholic  orthodoxy  the  Bible  was  a  dangerous  book  and 
the  reading  of  it  was  prohibited.  In  England  copies  of 
Wiclif  's  translation  were  confiscated  and  burned  wherever 
found  in  the  hands  of  the  people,  and  its  possession  was 
the  principal  charge  against  the  persecuted  Lollards.  One 
man  accused  of  "having  in  his  keeping  divers  works  pro- 
hibited and  damned  by  the  law,  to  wit  the  Apocalypse, 
the  Epistles  and  Gospels  in  English, "  died  in  prison  from 
cruel  treatment,  and  the  trio  convicted  of  having  "studied 


404  Catholicism 

diligently  upon  the  New  Testament  for  the  space  of  one 
year"  suffered  probably  a  similar  fate.1 

When  literalism  identified  the  eucharistic  elements 
with  Christ's  body  and  blood,  the  laity  ceased  to  have  any 
part  or  lot  in  the  magic-mystery  which  took  the  place  of 
the  old  thank-offering.  The  Host  is  now  declared  to  be 
the  present  Christ  apart  from  reception  by  the  faithful; 
they  have  but  to  fall  down  before  this  mere  thing  held  up 
for  their  adoration  in  the  hands  of  the  priest.  Primitive 
religions  cannot  show  a  grosser  fetichism. 

Prayer,  the  outpouring  of  the  heart  to  God,  is  the 
breath  of  the  spiritual  life,  but  the  Paters  and  Aves  of 
the  monk  are  a  routine  exercise,  perfunctory  and  soulless, 
and  the  petitions  of  the  layman,  debarred  from  communica- 
tion with  the  heavenly  Father,  are  addressed  to  mediators 
who  will  intercede  for  him,  the  perfect  dead.  For  the 
Friend  of  sinners  has  changed  in  men's  eyes  to  the  Judge, 
the  Rex  tremendce  majestatis,  and  the  Virgin  Mother  is 
specially  invoked  to  appease  the  wrath  of  her  Son. 

On  the  same  principle  the  Christian  must  confess  his 
sins  not  to  God,  but  to  his  spiritual  director.  In  such 
confession  he  is  bound  to  expose  all  his  life  and  conduct 
in  detail,  and  then  he  is  told  what  he  must  do  to  escape 
damnation.  There  can  be  no  question  of  moral  amend- 
ment, of  inward  change ;  outward  penances  are  the  thing 
required,  actions  so  mechanical  that  they  may  on  occasion 
be  vicariously  performed,  or  the  wealthy  sinner  may  buy 
immunity  in  a  draft  on  the  merits  of  the  saints  laid  up  in 
the  Church  treasury.  The  system  of  confession  which 
obliged  every  one  to  inform  against  himself  made  the 
clergy  a  world-wide  police,  and  the  powers  of  excom- 
munication and  interdict  coupled  with  their  lurid  painting 
of  the  terrors  of  hell  gave  them,  to  borrow  Dry  den's 
figure,  what  Archimedes  wanted,  another  world  on  which 

1  See  G.  M.  Trevelyan,  England  in  the  Age  of  Wycliffe,  131-342-349. 


Catholicism  405 

to  rest  the  lever  that  moved  this  one  at  their  pleasure. 
Thus  with  conscience  surrendered  to  clerical  direction, 
as  personal  conviction  had  been  yielded  to  the  Ecclesia 
Docens,  the  laity  were  reduced  to  spiritual  slavery  under 
an  initiated  ruling  caste. 

It  must  be  apparent  to  a  reflective  mind  that  any  pro- 
ject of  mechanical  mediation  devised  to  bring  the  human 
soul  into  union  with  God  is  a  childish  futility.  If  personal 
faith  is  life  in  communion  with  a  heavenly  Father  there  is 
no  need  of  any  tertium  quid  to  unite  those  who  are  already 
united.  And  if  faith  is  only  a  vain  aspiration,  and  the 
Being  it  seeks  is  eternally  beyond  its  reach,  then  no 
mediating  agency  can  possibly  be  found  which  has  power 
to  annul  this  fated  dualism  of  finite  and  infinite.  It  is 
moreover  equally  obvious  that  such  a  comprehensive 
scheme  of  tyrannical  tutelage  as  I  have  hastily  outlined 
is  miscalled  a  system  of  mediation.  So  far  from  mediating 
between  the  soul  and  God,  it  blocked  and  barred  their 
communion.  It  brought  the  soul  to  church  and  kept  it 
there.  For  the  Christian  the  means  of  grace  were  not 
means  but  the  end.  The  Church  stood  alone,  in  itself 
sacred  and  divine,  and  the  devotion  paid  to  it  was  nothing 
else  than  idolatrous.  According  to  Jesus  religion  is  the 
conscious  relation  of  the  soul  to  God,  a  relation  profoundly 
and  intensely  personal ;  but  in  the  history  of  the  Christian 
religion  we  find  human  personality  subordinated,  sub- 
jected and  finally  annihilated.  And  the  Divine  Per- 
sonality was  set  aside  as  well  when  a  man's  religion  was 
made  to  consist  in  his  relation  to  things  impersonal— 
in  observance  of  churchly  ceremonies  and  adherence  to 
a  set  of  scholastic  ideas.  Thus  eliminating  both  terms 
of  the  religious  relation,  God  and  the  soul,  the  Church 
took  away  religion  from  the  world. 

Again,  in  the  following  of  Jesus  the  religious  conscious- 
ness should  do  no  less  than  take  possession  of  the  man  in 


406  Catholicism 

mind,  heart,  and  will,  becoming  as  it  were  the  soul  of  life, 
the  animating  principle  of  all  thought  and  action;  but 
when  religion  came  to  mean  acceptance  of  a  creed  imposed 
by  authority  and  a  matter  of  rites  and  forms  and  "  prac- 
tices" of  devotion,  it  became  a  thing  apart  from  life 
and  divorced  from  morality.  No  longer  a  spiritual  power, 
the  Church  sustained  no  vital  relation  to  human  society. 
The  practical  life  of  the  world  was  left  to  take  care  of 
itself,  with  results  which  the  story  of  those  distracted 
times  pictures  in  detail.  During  long  ages  the  world 
remained  on  the  whole  a  heathen  world — men  when  they 
were  ill  thinking  of  religion  with  terror,  and  when  they 
were  in  health  not  thinking  of  it  at  all.  Christianity  be- 
ing removed  from  the  realm  of  the  conscience  and  the 
will,  its  primitive  moral  requirements  sank  out  of  sight,  a 
thing  of  the  forgotten  past.  Every  offence  had  its  easy 
condition  of  absolution,  and  it  satisfied  the  demands  of 
religion  if  a  man  gave  no  sign  of  dissent  from  the  orthodox 
theology  or  revolt  from  subjection  to  the  Church;  nothing 
else  mattered.  "Whether  upon  the  whole  religion  had 
passed  the  point  where  it  becomes  more  injurious  to 
morals  than  would  be  its  entire  absence"  is  a  question 
which  the  judicious  and  temperate  Hallam  finds  a  doubt- 
ful one.  At  all  events  it  had  reached  the  point  where 
crimes  could  be  commended  when  the  perpetrators  were 
zealous  for  the  faith  or  duly  considerate  of  ecclesiastical 
interests.  A  monkish  chronicler  tells  with  high  approba- 
tion how  a  bishop  made  a  baron  drunk  in  order  to  cheat 
him  out  of  an  estate.  And  Gregory  of  Tours,  after  relating 
the  atrocious  deed  of  Chlodwig  (Clovis)  in  the  murder  of 
a  prince  whom  he  had  instigated  to  parricide,  concludes : 
"For  God  daily  subdued  his  enemies  to  his  hand,  because 
he  walked  before  him  in  uprightness  and  did  what  was 
pleasing  in  His  eyes."  That  is,  the  Prankish  king  was 
an  orthodox  son  of  the  Church. 


Catholicism  407 

Nor  could  the  Church  be  looked  to  for  an  example  of  a 
higher  than  the  worldly  life.     Professing  a  pure  devotion 
to  the  things  of  the  spirit,  her  activities  were  centred  on 
the  things  of  sense,  and  she  stood  revealed  a  palpable  self- 
contradiction.     She  had  gained  the  whole  world  and  lost 
her  own  soul.     From  the  days  of  Const  an  tine  the  greed  of 
worldly  wealth  had  been  the  characteristic  vice  of  church- 
men, and  when  Gregory  passionately  besought  Charles 
Martel  to  save,  not  religion,  but  church  lands  from  the 
Lombard  invader,  he  was  not  the  first  to  show  greater 
solicitude  for  her  temporal  than  her  spiritual  interests. 
Thenceforth  more  than  ever  the  Church  seemed  bent  on 
heaping  up  riches  and  less  than  ever  seemed  to  care  by 
what    means    they    were    acquired — as    appeared    when 
license  to  pillage  was  sold  to  the  brigands  by  a  Pope 
misnamed  Innocent.1     The  reckless  rapacity,  the  cynical 
venality,   the  tide  of  corruption  that  surged  from  the 
Roman  court  through  every  channel  of  the  Church  sys- 
tem, might  now  and  then  stir  a  man  like  Grost6ste  to  a 
protest  of  indignant  sorrow,  but  in  general  contemporary 
writers  relate  the  infamous  transactions  of  their  time  with 
a  naivete  that  evidently  views  them  as  matters  of  course. 
By  such  means  the  Church  amassed  the  enormous  wealth 
which  became  the  bulwark  of  her  political  power  and 
the  instrument  of  her  political  intrigue.     In  right  of  their 
vast  possessions  the  ecclesiastical  body  took  stand  as 
feudal  lords,  and  bishops  and  abbots  were  also  counts 

1  "  Everyone  was  expected  to  bequeath  to  the  Church  some  portion 
of  his  property,  and  if  he  died  without  acquitting  himself  of  the  obligation 
the  Church  took  the  administration  of  his  effects  into  her  own  hands.  She 
appropriated  what  she  had  undertaken  to  dispose  of  for  the  benefit  of  the 
poor  to  her  own  use,  as  being  by  far  the  most  meritorious  pauper.  She 
was  presumed  to  have  been  the  more  immediate  object  of  the  intention  of 
the  deceased,  or  in  any  case  she  possessed  a  better  knowledge  of  what  would 
conduce  to  his  soul's  good. "  Mackay,  The  Rise  and  Progress  of  Christianity^ 
239- 


408  Catholicism 

and  princes,  maintaining  all  the  rank  and  power  of  the 
secular  dignity.  In  virtue  of  their  monopoly  of  education 
ecclesiastics  entered  the  courts  and  councils  of  princes 
and  became  the  power  behind  the  throne.  They  were 
chancellors,  ambassadors,  prime  ministers,  and  holding 
nearly  every  civil  function  held  the  reins  of  state  in  every 
court  of  Europe,  while  every  thread  in  the  network  of 
their  policy  ran  direct  to  Rome,  the  seat  of  a  sovereignty 
miscalled  spiritual. 

With  the  Church  itself  involved  in  the  moral  collapse 
there  was  nowhere  any  other  agency  to  effect  reform;  the 
Church  was  all  in  all. 

The  Church  did  not  need  to  go  back  to  Christ,  for  itself 
was  Christ  perpetuated.  It  did  not  need  to  return  to  the 
New  Testament,  for  it  continued  the  New  Testament.  Ever 
sufficient  to  itself  and  revolving  upon  itself,  it  moved  forward 
oblivious  to  the  fact  that  it  was  plunging  into  moral  degrada- 
tion, that  its  path  was  strewn  with  deeds  of  moral  monstrosity. 
Both  the  blind  and  the  blind  leaders  of  the  blind  fell  together 
into  the  ditch.1 

A  significant  interest  attaches  to  the  tragic  episode  in 
the  thirteenth  century  of  the  life  and  work  of  Francis. 
With  him,  perhaps  of  all  the  sons  of  men  the  truest  follower 
of  Jesus,  the  Gospel  reappeared  in  all  the  beauty  and 
power  of  its  appeal  to  the  unperverted  heart.  Sprung 
from  the  people,  like  the  prophets  of  Israel,  like  them 
Francis  had  heard  the  imperative  summons  of  a  divine 
commission.  He  and  his  companions  made  themselves 
apostles  of  the  Gospel  life,  the  life  of  purity,  of  moral 
vigor,  of  loving  service,  under  the  inspiration  of  a  deep 
personal  faith — a  life  in  their  eyes  so  natural  that  one 
need  only  come  to  know  it  to  embrace  it  eagerly.  The 
great  success  of  the  movement  attracted  the  attention  of 

1  Osborn,  The  Recovery  and  Restatement  of  the  Gospel,  62. 


Catholicism  409 

Church  authorities.  Such  activity  on  the  part  of  laymen 
was  irregular  and  disquieting;  it  was  necessary  to  bring  it 
under  ecclesiastical  control,  and  Francis  was  urged  in  a 
friendly  manner  to  adopt  the  "rule"  of  one  of  the  con- 
stituted monastic  orders.  Then  ensued  his  struggle  to 
keep  his  association  laic,  and  free  from  the  bonds  of  favors 
and  privileges  received  from  the  Church  at  the  price  of 
independence.  Independence  however  was  a  thing  the 
Church  could  not  possibly  allow;  it  knew  only  submission 
or  revolt.  Francis  was  not  lacking  in  courage,  but  his 
deep  humility  and  his  simple  trustfulness  betrayed  him 
to  the  astute  ecclesiastics.  He  could  not  well  be  crucified, 
and  so  they  swallowed  him,  and  the  light  he  had  upheld 
against  the  darkness  of  the  time  was  quenched  under  the 
robe  of  the  Franciscan  Order. 

When  the  priest  sees  himself  vanquished  by  the  prophet, 
he  quickly  changes  his  ways;  he  takes  him  under  his  protec- 
tion, he  inserts  his  harangues  in  the  sacred  canon,  he  throws 
upon  his  shoulders  the  priestly  chasuble.  The  days  and  the 
years  pass,  and  the  moment  comes  when  the  crowd  no  longer 
distinguishes  between  them  and  ends  by  viewing  the  prophets 
as  belonging  to  the  clergy.  It  is  one  of  the  bitterest  ironies 
of  history.1 

It  may  be  true  that  the  spirit  of  the  Gospel  of  Jesus 
could  not  be  retained  on  earth  except  an  earthly  body  were 
given  to  it;  but  if  this  was  the  historic  necessity,  it  was 
none  the  less  a  necessary  evil.  Very  soon — and  this  is  a 
point  of  first  importance  to  a  right  understanding  of 
Christian  history — very  soon  the  Body  of  Christ  showed 
itself  subject  to  disease  and  decay.  The  Church  of  the 
Middle  Ages  has  few  defenders.  That  the  kingdom  of 
Christ's  Vicar  became  a  kingdom  of  this  world,  dominated 

1  Paul  Sabatier,  Vie  de  S.  Frangois  d'Assise.  Introduction,  viii.  A 
work  of  unusual  value  and  interest. 


410  Catholicism 

by  the  worldly  spirit,  recreant  to  its  trust  and  mission, 
betraying  and  denying  its  divine  Master  and  sacrificing 
duty,  honor,  decency  to  its  reckless  greed  of  wealth  and 
power — all  who  are  acquainted  with  its  history  will 
readily  admit.  But  it  is  the  common  opinion  that  the 
corruption  of  the  Church  which  stirred  the  soul  of  Luther 
had  its  origin  in  the  medieval  period.  It  is  looked  upon 
as  a  lapse  from  earlier  Catholicism,  a  decline  and  fall,  an 
obscuration  of  the  pristine  purity  that  halos  the  ante- 
Nicene  golden  age.  Before  the  day  of  Constantine  the 
Church  was  faultless,  but  it  fell  upon  evil  times  and 
suffered  from  the  influence  of  an  unwholesome  environ- 
ment, and  as  we  know,  the  worst  things  are  those  that 
come  from  abuse  of  the  best.  In  this  view  the  ecclesiastical 
institution  escapes  obloquy  and  the  evil  that  vitiates  it 
appears  something  adventitious.  It  is  a  view  that  history 
will  not  allow  us  to  entertain.  The  corruption  of  the 
Church  was  a  native  growth.  It  was  not  due  to  adverse 
circumstance,  to  a  blight  fallen  upon  Christianity  from 
without.  It  was  a  corrupt  tree  that  bore  that  evil  fruit. 
The  seeds  of  decay,  the  noxious  germs  of  medieval  Ca- 
tholicism, were  sown  in  the  second  century,  the  formative 
period  of  Catholic  Christianity  that  determined  all  its 
after  development.1  Then  arises  the  movement  that  will 
substitute  creed  for  life,  a  dogma  of  theology  for  a  Father 
in  heaven,  a  despotic  hierarchy  for  the  spiritual  equality  of 
Christians,  a  sacerdotal  mystery  for  the  commemorative 
meal  of  loyalty  and  love.  Then  everywhere  the  outward 
and  sensuous  begins  to  take  the  place  of  the  inward  and 
spiritual,  and  then  the  infinite  falsity  that  rules  the 
destiny  of  historic  Christianity  declares  itself  in  the  flat 

1  "All  the  elements  of  the  later  development  of  the  constitution  of  the 
Church  were  present  and  operating  at  the  end  of  the  second  century,  and 
indeed  earlier."  Harnack,  Constitution  and  Law  of  the  Church  in  the  First 
Two  Centuries,  170. 


Catholicism  411 

negation  of  the  first  principle  of  the  Gospel  revelation, 
the  unity  in  nature  of  God  and  man.  It  is  to  this  age  and 
no  later  one  that  the  impartial  student  will  trace  the 
sources  of  the  corruption  that  only  asks  time  to  mount 
and  spread  through  every  fibre  of  the  ecclesiastical  body. 

Q.    Authority 

In  the  second  century  the  Army  of  the  Lord  was  ad- 
vancing in  three  columns  on  three  lines  of  march  which 
finally  converged  at  an  impregnable  position,  the  authority 
of  the  Church.  Or,  since  what  is  last  in  time  is  first  in 
the  order  of  thought,  we  may  say  that  the  principle  of 
Authority  was  the  constructive  principle  of  Catholicism. 
It  was  this  that  shaped  its  whole  development;  the  hier- 
archical constitution,  the  dogmatic  creed,  the  scriptural 
canon  may  be  regarded  as  specific  functionings  of  this 
ruling  idea,  latent  in  the  ecclesiastical  mind,  and  under  its 
impulse  the  Catholic  Church  grew  into  "a  vast  authori- 
tative system,  like  the  Roman  Empire,  whose  power  of 
command  was  not  to  be  resisted  or  questioned."1  The 
ecclesiastical  claim  of  authority,  and  its  complement  the 
ecclesiastical  virtue  of  obedience,  rest  on  that  proton 
pseudos  of  the  mediating  Church,  the  assumption  of  the 
spiritual  incompetency  of  the  individual  Christian.  The 
great  revolt  of  the  sixteenth  century  was  a  movement  to 
the  emancipation  of  the  spirit,  and  it  freed  large  numbers 
of  Christians  from  the  authority  of  the  Church,  and  its 
hierarchy;  but  not  from  that  of  the  Scriptures,  nor  from 
that  of  a  dogmatic  creed.  For  Protestantism  these 
continued  to  be  authoritative  in  the  strictest  sense,  and 
so  the  principle  of  authority  in  religion  maintained  its 
sway.  The  Reformers  went  back  to  Paul  for  their 
religion  rather  than  to  Jesus,  but  they  did  not  gather 
1  Allen,  Christian  Institutions,  176. 


412  Catholicism 

from  the  Apostle's  teaching  that  a  Gospel  which  freed 
men  from  the  yoke  of  Law  was  equally  intolerant  of 
subservience  to  any  and  every  external  authority  over  the 
personal  religious  life. 

As  to  this  question  of  authority  let  us  see  what  we  may 
learn  from  the  Master.  The  words  of  Jesus  voiced  an 
absolute  self-confidence:  "Ye  have  heard  it  hath  been 
said  by  them  of  old  time  .  .  .  but  I  say  unto  you."  We 
read  in  the  first  gospel  that  "the  people  were  astonished 
at  his  doctrine,  for  he  taught  them  as  one  having  authority 
and  not  as  the  Scribes."  The  Scribes  were  always  refer- 
ring to  their  authorities.  Their  teaching  leaned  for  support 
on  Scripture  and  tradition,  and  was  sure  of  itself  only  so 
far  as  it  accorded  with  the  teachings  of  old.  Jesus  spoke 
with  a  bold  self-assertiveness  that  sought  no  confirma- 
tion from  any  authority  however  august  or  revered.  He 
spoke  as  one  free  to  judge  the  competence  of  any  time- 
honored  authority ;  as  one  who  himself  was  the  authority. 
What  is  the  secret  of  this  self-assurance,  the  explanation 
of  this  authoritative  tone?  To  the  Scribe  divine  inspira- 
tion was  only  to  be  found  in  documents ;  revelation  was  an 
ancient  history  and  the  records  of  the  past  the  only  wit- 
ness to  God's  presence  with  men.  Jesus  felt  within 
himself  that  presence,  and  his  striking  originality  and 
independence  were  the  utterance  of  this  inspired  con- 
sciousness. No  man  ever  spoke  with  a  more  decisive 
authority,  but  the  authority  is  not  his  own;  it  is  that  of 
truth  and  goodness,  of  the  God  in  whose  name  he  speaks, 
and  it  has  been  truly  said,  "  he  is  never  more  selfless  than 
when  he  most  asserts  himself."  He  gives  utterance  to  the 
spiritual  truths  revealed  in  his  consciousness,  and  in 
uttering  them  he  imposes  them,  or  rather  they  impose 
themselves  by  their  own  virtue.  Truth  itself  seems  to 
speak  with  his  voice  in  accents  of  calm  certitude,  illumi- 
nating and  convincing  like  the  power  to  charm  of  holiness 


Catholicism  413 

or  love.  The  fourth  gospel  which  most  exalts  his  person 
makes  him  claim  authority  only  for  the  truth  of  his 
message :  ' '  If  a  man  believe  not  my  word  I  judge  him 
not;  the  word  which  I  have  spoken  will  judge  him  at  the 
last  day."  The  third  Evangelist  gives  us  the  passage 
above  referred  to  in  a  different  form:  "The  people  were 
astonished  at  his  doctrine,  for  his  word  was  with  power.'* 
It  was  the  power  that  was  the  authority.  His  word  went 
direct  to  the  heart  and  conscience,  the  inmost  soul  of 
men;  they  felt  its  power;  their  dim  and  dormant  spiritual 
sense  awoke  in  response  to  his  call  upon  it,  and  they 
bowed  to  his  authority  for  they  felt  it  to  be  impersonal : 
it  was  the  authority  of  self-authenticating  truth  and 
of  the  absolute  imperative  of  the  good. 

Even  in  his  most  emphatic  utterances  Jesus  appealed  to  the 
reason  and  conscience  and  the  spiritual  instincts  of  his  audi- 
ence. He  demands  belief  not  because  he  says  a  thing,  but  he 
expects  it  to  make  an  impression  on  men's  minds  and  to  gain 
their  assent  because  it  carries  in  it  its  own  authority ;  because 
it  awakens  a  secret  consciousness  of  its  truth  in  those  whom  he 
addresses ;  because  it  needs  only  to  be  uttered  to  obtain  the 
assent  of  honest  hearts  open  to  conviction.  His  appeal 
passes  from  his  own  higher  nature  to  that  of  his  hearers; 
it  is  addressed  to  the  moral  sense  within  them,  and  the  author- 
ity with  which  he  was  felt  by  the  multitudes  to  speak  was 
derived  from  the  inward  assent  and  testimony  of  their  own 
consciences.  x 

Other  authority  than  this  there  is  none.2    The  test  of 
any  authoritative  teaching  is  its  power  over  men,  and  the 

1  Mackintosh,  The  Natural  History  of  the  Christian  Religion,  70. 

a  "The  authority  of  a  man  of  genius  flows  purely  from  his  higher  insight, 
and  is  recognised  by  others  in  whom  that  insight  dwells  in  less  intense  form. 
The  truth  of  Christianity  cannot  be  established  by  an  appeal  to  any  author- 
ity other  than  the  response  of  man's  spirit."  Watson,  The  Philosophic 
Basis  of  Religion,  36. 


414  Catholicism 

proof  of  its  authority  lies  in  men's  personal  experience  of 
its  truth.  The  only  verification  of  which  a  spiritual  truth 
is  capable  lies  in  its  appeal  to  men's  intuitions.  Of  this 
the  Apostle  is  aware  when  he  writes:  "by  the  manifesta- 
tion of  the  truth  commending  ourselves  to  every  man's 
conscience  in  the  sight  of  God."  And  Jesus  seems  always 
urging  men  to  try  his  teaching,  to  practise  it,  and  see  if  it 
be  not  true:  "Everyone  that  heareth  these  words  of 
mine  and  doeth  them  shall  be  likened  unto  a  wise  man  that 
built  his  house  upon  the  rock." 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  the  ecclesiastical  assumption 
that  truth  is  not  self -evidencing,  but  a  doctrine  depends 
for  its  truth  upon  external  attestation.  It  is  to  be  ac- 
cepted for  true  because  set  forth  by  authority,  rather 
than  acknowledged  as  authoritative  because  recognised 
as  true.  For  divine  truth  is  not  apprehensible  by  the 
intelligence  of  the  individual,  and  he  can  only  receive  it 
by  accepting  the  teaching,  of  the  Church,  the  guardian 
of  revelation.1  But  that  is  not  to  receive  it  at  all.  In 
no  proper  sense  of  the  word  can  one  "receive"  truth  that 
is  not  apprehensible 'and  verifiable  by  his  own  mind,  nor 
can  an  ' '  acceptance ' '  of  Church  doctrine  which  does  not 
imply  intelligence  of  it  be  a  thing  of  any  meaning.  One 
incapable  of  comprehending  revealed  truth  cannot  know 

"Churches,  Bibles,  Prophets  are  of  authority  to  us  all  just  in  the  measure 
in  which  they  quicken  in  us  an  answering  inward  sense  of  the  verity  of 
that  which  they  allege."  Armstrong,  God  and  the  Soul,  146. 

"Any  other  authoritativeness  than  that  of  the  truth  itself,  responded  to 
by  the  nature  of  the  man  himself,  avails  only  to  dwarf  and  not  to  develop 
the  man  over  whom  it  prevails."  Moore,  op.  tit.,  320. 

1  This  doctrine  of  the  feeble  or  limited  powers  of  the  human  mind,  urged 
by  Newman  to  enforce  the  authority  of  the  Church  and  by  Mansel  to 
enforce  the  authority  of  Scripture,  was  carried  to  its  logical  issue  by  Spencer 
who  pronounced  God  to  be  a  name  for  the  ultimate  Reality  which  remains 
unknowable  by  us.  A  deeper  philosophy  than  his  is  aware  that  an  un- 
knowable reality  is  simply  an  unreality,  that  nothing  can  be  saved  to 
reality  which  is  denied  to  knowledge. 


Catholicism  415 

what  it  is  of  which  the  Church  speaks,  and  the  Church 
can  no  more  teach  it  to  such  a  one  than  we  can  make  a 
dog  understand  a  demonstration  in  Euclid.  And  so 
"the  very  idea  of  a  religious  authority  external  to  man  is 
based  on  a  childish  psychology,  and  a  little  thought  will 
suffice  to  convince  us  that  it  is  always  and  everywhere  a 
fallacy."1  Furthermore,  let  us  ask  what  qualifications 
enable  the  Church  to  guarantee  the  truth  of  its  deliver- 
ances. The  mind  of  the  Church  is  not  other  than  human. 
The  Church  does  not  possess  any  special  powers  of  insight 
not  belonging  to  the  general  mind  of  man.  Water  will 
not  rise  above  its  source,  nor  the  intellectual  capacity 
of  the  Church,  though  regarded  as  an  abstract  entity, 
above  that  of  the  individuals  who  compose  it.2  Here  I 
may  be  told  that  this  is  beside  the  point,  for  it  is  the 
Apostolic  Church,  the  trustee  of  apostolic  tradition,  that 
claims  authority.  The  teaching  of  the  Church  is  of  that 
which  has  come  down  to  it  through  the  ages  from  the 
disciples  who  were  taught  by  the  Lord  himself.  But  in 
the  first  place,  if  in  its  early  day  the  Church  might  hold 
itself  to  be  only  the  divinely  appointed  instrument 
for  the  transmission  of  the  faith  once  delivered  to  the 
saints,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  this  passive  r61e  was 
relinquished  in  the  creed-making  ages  when  it  formulated 
a  metaphysical  theology  such  as  the  companions  of  Jesus 
would  have  found  incomprehensible.  Secondly,  this 
foundation  of  apostolicity,  upon  which  rests  the  authority 
of  the  Creed,  the  Canon  and  the  Episcopate,  history 
shows  to  be  in  every  case  a  foundation  of  sand,  a  figment 

1  J.  Re"ville,  Liberal  Christianity,  1 75. 

3  "  Men  have  spoken  of  the  authority  of  the  Church  as  if  the  Church 
could  by  any  possibility  have  authority  save  as  it  enshrines  personality 
and  becomes  a  sort  of  sum  of  the  influence  of  personalities  for  the  guidance 
of  the  life  of  persons  in  the  world.  The  essence  of  the  authority  of  the 
Church  lies  in  its  representing  a  corporate  experience  which  yet  was 
individual  experience  before  it  was  corporate."  Moore,  op.  cit.,  317. 


416  Catholicism 

of  theorists.  Finally,  the  Apostles  could  not  bestow  a 
kind  of  authority  they  did  not  possess.  The  followers  of 
Jesus  were  called,  it  is  true,  his  disciples,  or  pupils.  He 
was  addressed  as  Master  and  questions  of  all  sorts  were 
put  to  him  as  to  other  teachers.  Yet  whatever  his 
reputation,  Jesus  was  no  professional  Rabbi,  nor  the 
founder  of  a  school.  That  his  disciples  formed  such  a 
school,  becoming  in  their  turn  authorities  in  the  exposi- 
tion of  religious  truth,  is  one  of  the  many  ecclesiastical 
fancies  concerning  Christian  origins  which  misrepresent 
the  real  conditions  of  the  past.  The  disciples  were 
expressly  forbidden  to  assume  the  function  of  authorita- 
tive teachers,  like  the  Scribes.  None  of  them,  said  Jesus, 
was  to  accept  the  title  of  Master  or  Teacher,  and  none 
was  to  be  preferred  above  another,  for  they  all  were  breth- 
ren. That  this  prohibition  is  emphasised  in  the  tradi- 
tion shows  that  it  was  distinctly  remembered  and  in 
the  earliest  time  strictly  observed.  All  who  received  the 
Gospel  were  disciples  of  Jesus  alone,  and  this  common 
relation  was  the  ground  of  the  equality  of  all  and  the 
spiritual  independence  of  each.  Jesus  taught  by  what  he 
was.  His  own  person  and  character  spoke  with  the 
authority  that  truth  exercises  over  the  mind  and  goodness 
over  the  conscience  and  love  over  the  heart.  It  is  author- 
ity of  a  kind  that  does  not  drive  men  but  draws  them, 
for  it  wins  their  instinctive  deference.  It  was  this  author- 
ity he  would  have  his  companions  share.  Filled  with  his 
spirit  and  fashioned  in  his  likeness,  they  should  speak 
with  his  power,  and  he  could  say:  "He  that  heareth 
you  heareth  me."  And  so  too  the  commission  of  the 
Christian  Church  is  to  teach  what  Jesus  taught  and  in 
the  way  he  taught  it;  not  dominating  but  enlightening 
the  minds  of  men;  not  demanding  their  assent  to  its 
teachings,  but  opening  their  eyes  to  the  self -evidencing 
and  therefore  authoritative  truth.  For  always  it  is  the 


Catholicism  417 

true,  the  good,  the  divine  that  rightfully  command  us, 
and  we  are  so  made  that  we  readily  acknowledge  their 
authority,  or  if  we  revolt  against  it  we  are  in  revolt  against 
our  own  best  self.  Of  such  a  nature  is  the  legitimate 
authority  of  the  Church.  Its  dogmas  have  just  that 
degree  of  authority,  and  no  more,  which  is  given  them 
by  their  harmony  with  truth,  as  that  manifests  itself  to 
reason.  Its  institutions  and  ordinances  are  authoritative 
only  in  so  far  as  they  are  expressions  of  the  true,  the 
good  and  the  divine.  The  question  always  is,  are  they 
really  such  expressions — a  question  which  the  history  of 
the  Christian  Church  cannot  answer  with  an  unqualified 
affirmative,  nor  will  a  student  of  that  history  be  disposed 
to  acknowledge  that  the  Church  is  the  sole  depositary  of 
these  spiritual  treasures,  and  that  it  is  only  through 
ecclesiastical  channels  they  are  dispensed  to  men. 

To  remove  the  seat  of  authority  from  every  outward 
dictatorship  to  the  inward  spirit  of  man,  and  in  the 
name  of  the  inward  authority  to  abrogate  the  outward, 
this  was  the  revolution  implicit  in  the  Gospel  and  its 
necessary  outcome.  It  was  a  revolution  that  soon  en- 
countered the  check  of  reaction.  The  Church,  the  Creed, 
the  Scriptures,  enshrining  something  of  truth,  goodness, 
God,  have  claimed  for  themselves  the  authority  which 
belongs  to  that  which  they  enshrine.  Their  authority 
has  been  taken,  not  as  representative,  but  as  inherent  and 
of  its  own  right  binding  upon  men.  No  one  is  allowed  to 
question  this  authority;  it  does  not  consult  but  controls 
the  intelligence,  and  exacts  a  blind  submission  which  is 
miscalled  faith.  And  then?  We  have  submitted  to 
authority,  we  are  safe  in  the  fold  of  the  Church,  we  may 
sleep  in  peace.  But  that  is  the  sleep  of  death.  Faith  is  an 
energy,  and  no  authority  can  dispense  us  from  its  exercise. 
It  is  sufficiently  obvious  that  the  Creed  or  the  Scriptures 
or  the  orthodox  theology  are  not  truth  for  me  unless  my 

27 


418  Catholicism 

mind  takes  in  the  truth  they  assert  and  assents  to  it. 
And  then  all  is  done;  authority  has  no  part  to  play.  If 
a  man  is  brought  to  see  what  is  true  and  right,  to  feel 
the  beauty  and  power  of  the  good,  what  need  is  there  of 
any  authority  to  enforce  their  claims?  Or  what  further 
authority  is  possible?  These  things  assert  themselves  as 
absolute;  there  is  no  higher  authority  to  give  them  sanc- 
tion. If  they  do  not  make  themselves  felt,  do  not  waken 
the  response  of  a  man's  own  mind  and  heart,  recourse  to 
external  authority  cannot  help  the  man. x  When  Matthew 
Arnold  would  teach  us  what  is  meant  by  "the  grand 
style"  in  poetry,  he  does  not  dogmatise,  does  not  ask  us 
to  accept  his  ipse  dixit  as  authoritative ;  he  appeals  to  our 
poetic  sense.  He  cites  examples  and  asks,  Does  that 
impress  you,  does  it  speak  for  itself?  then  you  know  what 
the  grand  style  is.  It  is  the  right  method  in  religious 
teaching.  When  they  asked  Jesus,  "By  what  authority 
doest  thou  these  things?"  he  answered,  By  the  same  as 
that  of  John  the  heaven-sent  prophet.  That  is,  he 
simply  claimed  for  his  teaching  the  authoritativeness 
which  belongs  to  the  obviously  true  and  right.  In  the 
sense  of  his  questioners  he  claimed  no  authority  at  all. 
He  felt  that  freedom  from  external  authority  was  indis- 
pensable to  any  deepening  of  men's  religious  life.  He 

1  "II  est  juste  que  si  ma  vie  inte"rieure  s'endort,  si  1'indiffe'rence  engourdit 
et  paralyse  ma  conscience,  il  est  juste  et  bon  que  toute  certitude  m'Schappe, 
que  je  me  sente  chancelant  et  que  je  ne  sache  plus  ou  me  prendre.  On 
voudrait  des  appuis  pour  le  moment  ou  1'appui  de  1'esprit  fait  de"faut.  II 
n'y  en  a  point;  il  ne  doit  point  y  en  avoir.  On  voudrait  poss£der  un  moyen 
de  pouvoir  croire  sans  croire  aux  heures  ou  dans  1'affaissement  de  la  vie 
spirituelle  on  ne  croit  plus.  Ce  moyen  n'existe  pas;  il  ne  faut  pas  qu'il 
existe.  II  ne  faut  pas  que  nous  puissions  nous  imaginer  que  nous  sommes  d 
1'abri  parce  que  nous  avons  trouv6  notre  refuge  dans  des  croyances  correctes 
ou  dans  les  pratiques  de  deVotion  officielle. ' '  L.  Monod,  quoted  in  Sabatier, 
op.  cit.,  433. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  men  reject  a  religious  teaching  because  they  find 
it  untrue,  compulsion,  persecution,  Dragonades,  Autos-da-fe  cannot  help 
the  cause  of  the  untruth. 


Catholicism  419 

appealed  to  the  moral  sense  of  his  hearers,  their  intuitive 
reason,  their  kindlier  instincts,  and  he  left  with  them  the 
issue,  saying:  "He  that  hath  ears  to  hear,  let  him  hear." 
If  we  have  the  mind  of  Jesus  in  this  matter  we  shall  know 
that  the  only  authority  for  the  truth  is  the  truth  itself, 
and  the  responsibility  for  a  man's  attitude  toward  the 
truth  rests  solely  with  the  man  himself.  It  is  one  that 
cannot  be  taken  from  him,  nor  can  he  divest  himself  of  it. 
Yet  men  try  to  escape  it.  They  will  not  themselves 
strive  to  gain  insight  of  the  truth,  and  it  only  remains  to 
take  what  is  given  them  for  truth  on  the  word  of  authority. 
But  submission  to  authority  is  homage  paid  to  a  usurper. 
The  authority  sits  on  the  throne  of  the  true  and  right 
and  its  deliverances  are  accepted  not  because  in  themselves 
they  are  convincingly  true  and  right,  but  because  the 
authority  declares  them  to  be  so.  It  is  the  weakness  of 
human  nature  that  leads  to  the  craving  for  authority,  for 
some  outward  reliance  to  take  the  place  of  self-reliance. 
Men  find  it  difficult  and  dangerous  to  walk  alone,  to  think 
for  oneself,  and  shrinking  from  the  responsibility  of  forming 
their  own  judgments  or  controlling  their  own  lives,  they 
incur  the  graver  responsibility  of  putting  themselves  in 
the  hands  of  others  who  offer  to  take  charge  of  them  and 
make  their  own  exertion  unnecessary.  This  is  suicidal, 
for  self -activity  is  the  life  of  spirit.  The  one  effort  of 
Jesus  was  to  rouse,  stimulate,  inspire  it;  his  one  aim  was 
to  make  men,  or  rather  to  lead  men  to  make  themselves. 
We  may  read  in  the  tragic  history  of  Christianity  how  the 
brute  force  of  ecclesiasticism  has  crushed  or  stupefied  the 
spirit  whose  life  is  freedom;  and  this  because  external 
compulsion  of  command  or  restraint  is  destructive  of 
character,  since  that  is  a  man's  own  creation. 

It  may  be  said  that  a  religion  of  authority  is  a  needful 
discipline  for  the  unintelligent  and  the  spiritually  im- 
mature, and  through  this  is  developed  the  capacity  for 


Catholicism 

personal  autonomous  life.  It  is  enough  to  answer  that 
Jesus  did  not  think  so.  He  dealt  with  the  common 
people,  the  ignorant  and  uneducated,  but  he  saw  no  need 
to  put  them  in  leading  strings.  Just  as  they  were,  they 
were  competent  to  receive  the  Gospel  he  preached.  Trust 
in  the  Heavenly  Father,  the  love  of  brother  men,  inward 
righteousness  and  purity  of  soul,  these  things  find  response 
in  the  heart  of  our  common  humanity.  The  wayfaring 
man  though  a  fool  is  not  without  the  elemental  manhood 
to  which  Jesus  trusted  his  message.  It  is  evident  in  view 
of  what  he  had  in  mind  that  to  demand  acceptance  of  his 
teaching  on  the  ground  of  his  personal  authority,  to  re- 
quire his  hearers  to  take  what  he  said  for  true  because 
he  said  it,  would  be  to  defeat  his  purpose.  And  it  is  idle 
to  claim  that  the  religion  of  the  spirit  is  the  end  attained 
by  a  discipline  of  authority  that  arrests  the  free  energies 
of  the  spirit.  In  fact  religions  of  authority  always  regard 
the  temper  of  submission  as  an  end  in  itself.  They  who 
make  this  claim  remind  us  of  those  politicians  who  have 
declared  themselves  in  favor  of  a  protection  that  leads  to 
free  trade.  That  is  a  kind  of  protection  of  which  we  have 
no  experience ;  the  advocates  of  protection  have  never 
found  the  time  ripe  for  its  abandonment. 

Let  us  be  convinced  that  religion  is  not  something  we 
can  take  at  second  hand  from  others.  Religion  is  life, 
spontaneity,  personal  initiative — or  it  is  nothing.  It  is  a 
personal  responsibility  essentially  inalienable.  Responsi- 
bility to  whom?  To  God,  the  only  authority  that  can 
rightfully  claim  the  submission  of  the  soul.  From  Him 
comes  the  only  compulsion  that  leaves  man  man,  for  it 
comes  with  his  own  free  recognition  of  its  right  to 
compel  him.  This  authority  alone  is  of  such  a  nature 
that  its  rule  is  not  so  much  the  constraint  as  the 
liberation  of  the  soul's  activities.  It  does  not  impose  an 
outward  obligation,  but  one  that  lives  in  the  very  nature 


Catholicism  421 

of  man,  and  in  obedience  to  its  behest  is  the  growth  of  a 
man's  own  character.  The  service  of  God  is  freedom— 
and  no  other  service  is — because  in  the  ideal  truth  of  his 
being,  in  his  higher  self,  man  is  one  with  God,  and  hence 
the  more  entire  the  self-surrender  the  more  complete  is 
the  self -attainment. 

To  such  effect  we  might  argue  with  the  ecclesiastic 
and  those  who  submit  to  his  control:  let  me  add  a  final 
word  on  a  point  of  deeper  moment  which  these  brief 
studies  bring  to  our  view.  In  his  "  Introduction  to  the 
Gospel  of  St.  Luke"  Maurice  observes  that  the  Gospel  of 
Jesus  is  not  a  religion  at  all.  It  seems  a  case  of  what  is  not 
uncommon,  that  one  may  utter  a  deeper  truth  than  he 
himself  has  realised.  If  the  Broad  Church  leader  had 
grasped  his  own  declaration  in  the  fulness  of  its  meaning, 
in  all  its  reach  and  bearing,  he  might  not  have  incurred 
Arnold's  criticism  that  "he  passed  his  life  in  beating  the 
bush  without  ever  starting  the  hare."  Let  us  take  this 
dictum  of  Maurice  in  earnest,  and  if  it  seems  a  mere  misuse 
of  terms,  still  any  phrase  is  good  that  puts  a  matter  in  a 
clearer  light,  and  this  one  may  help  to  bring  the  essential 
character  of  the  Gospel  more  distinctly  into  view.  The 
Christian  religion,  then,  is  in  spite  of  itself  the  best  of 
religions;  but  it  is  only  a  religion.  The  Gospel  of  Jesus 
is  not  a  religion  at  all.  In  so  far  as  religious  conceptions 
control  and  shape  the  apprehension  of  it,  and  are  not 
themselves  transcended  and  transmuted  by  its  spirit,  it 
must  inevitably  lose  its  true  character.1  Christianity  is 

1  "The  revelation  of  the  Christ  is  not  within  the  process  of  the  history 
of  religions.  It  is  not  to  be  brought  as  one  stage  into  the  development,  or 
as  one  subject  in  the  comparative  study  of  religions.  It  is  other  and  more 
than  they.  It  can  no  more  take  the  place  to  which  it  is  invited  among  the 
various  religions  of  the  world  than  the  figure  of  the  Christ  can  take  its 
place  in  the  Pantheon  of  a  Julian."  Mulford,  The  Republic  of  God,  57. 

For  many  evil  consequences  of  taking  the  Gospel  for  a  religion  see  pp. 
70-80. 


422  Catholicism 

the  Gospel  made  into  a  religion,  and  so  become  an  amalga- 
mation of  incompatibles,  of  contradictories.  Hence  its 
weakness  and  its  relative  failure  in  the  life  of  man,  or  the 
history  of  the  world.  It  has  not  been  perceived  that 
where  the  Gospel  comes  in  conflict  with  Judaism  there 
it  is  in  conflict  with  religion.  Judaic  ideas  were  religious 
ideas;  the  Pharisee  was  the  type  of  a  strictly  religious  man, 
one  who  cared  more  for  religion  than  for  humanity.  Jesus 
appeared  in  a  land  the  most  deeply  religious  in  the  ancient 
world,  and  he  ignored  religion,  he  put  it  aside,  and  when  it 
attacked  him  struck  back  in  self-defense.  Every  religion, 
it  has  been  maintained,  and  with  historical  justification, 
consists  of  a  creed  and  a  cultus,  and  any  concern  with 
either  is  conspicuously  absent  from  the  ministry  of  Jesus. 
His  attitude  toward  them  is  given  us  by  the  fourth  Evangel- 
ist :  God  is  Spirit,  and  men  must  worship  Him  in  spirit  and 
in  truth,  for  such  doth  the  Father  seek  to  be  His  worship- 
pers ;  if  any  man  will  do  His  will  he  shall  know  of  the  teach- 
ing, whether  it  be  of  God.  Jesus  sets  forth  no  religious 
institutes;  he  has  no  suggestion  of  form  of  worship  or 
formula  of  doctrine  or  rules  of  pious  practice.1  He  faces 
the  great  realities,  the  fundamentals:  Here  we  are,  we 
men  on  earth;  what  is  our  life,  how  are  we  to  live?  Live, 

1  "Jesus  seems  to  have  aimed  to  show  men  how  in  love  and  joy  to  live 
the  common  life  in  full  sense  of  the  presence  of  God  and  of  eternity.  His 
greatest  contribution  was  that  in  joy  and  love  he  lived  that  life.  The 
contrast  between  religion  and  life,  fundamental  to  so  many  others,  was 
completely  alien  to  him.  To  him  true  religion  was  life,  and  religion  was 
the  true  life."  Moore,  op.  cit.,  263. 

"His  revelation  implies  the  great  simplification  of  religion,  the  emphasis- 
ing of  the  essential,  of  the  really  important.  It  implies  the  end  of  theology. 
Christianity  is  in  its  essence  a  layman's  religion,  for  its  prophet  was  Jesus, 
a  layman.  But  the  rise  of  the  Pauline  theology  brought  about  the  great 
change;  as  for  Christian  dogma,  with  its  revelation  of  a  body  of  doctrine, 
it  is  the  veriest  caricature  of  the  Gospel.  Jesus  redeemed  the  people  from 
the  Scribes,  and  by  the  Scribes  he  was  put  to  death.  The  two  events  are 
related  as  cause  and  effect."  Wernle,  The  Beginnings  of  Christianity,  i, 
101. 


Catholicism  423 

he  tells  us,  conscious  that  you  are  a  child  of  God,  thanking 
Him  for  His  goodness  in  the  past  and  present,  trusting 
Him  for  the  future  and  trying  to  do  His  will.  And  His 
will  is  that  we  shall  be  pure  and  true  and  kind.  That  last 
word  names  our  feeling  for  our  kin,  the  human  brother- 
hood. Life  is  to  be  lighted  and  warmed  by  love,  love  to 
God  our  Father  and  to  men  our  brothers.  That  is  all, 
for  that  is  enough.  And  it  takes  us  above  and  beyond 
religion.  What  is  religion  ?  It  begins  in  a  yearning  of  the 
human  soul  to  seek  some  Divine  One,  if  haply  it  may  feel 
after  Him  and  find  Him ;  it  is  the  groping  for  some  means  to 
come  into  relation  with  a  God  who  is  unrelated  to  us,  the 
fruitless  quest  of  some  meeting-point  between  finite  man 
and  the  Infinite  he  must  adore — fruitless  because  between 
these  two  there  is  a  great  gulf  fixed.  And  then  the 
aspiration  of  the  spirit  sinks  into  an  art  of  bribery,  efforts 
to  purchase  the  divine  favor  and  propitiate  the  divine 
wrath ;  and  there  follow  sacrifice  and  priesthood,  ritual  and 
ordinance  and  all  the  futile  devices  of  a  mechanical 
communication  between  the  two  essentially  alien  worlds 
of  earth  and  heaven,  or  of  nature  and  grace.  Thus  the 
ground  thought  of  religion  appears:  the  dualism,  the 
separateness  of  human  and  divine, — just  as  Agnosticism 
rests  on  the  dualism  of  subject  and  object.  Their  com- 
mon error  is  to  remain  with  the  moment  of  antithesis  as  a 
finality,  and  fail  to  recognise  it  as  the  immanent  distinc- 
tion in  the  unity  of  spirit.  This  unity,  the  living  unity  of 
man  and  God,  is  the  revelation  of  the  Gospel.  And  so 
the  Gospel  is  the  answer  to  the  human  yearning :  it  is  the 
revelation  that  the  meeting-point  is  not  to  seek,  for  it  is 
found  in  the  ideal  manhood  whose  realisation  in  ' '  the  first- 
born of  many  brethren"  is  the  assurance  that  we  all  shall 
come  at  last  to  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  his  fulness. 
The  Gospel  then  is  not  a  religion,  because  it  is  the  goal  of 
all  religions.  They  are  a  striving  towar  dthe  truth;  this 


424  Catholicism 

is  the  truth.  Jesus  has  no  scheme  to  bridge  the  gulf 
between  human  and  divine;  he  declares  there  is  no  gulf  to 
bridge.  He  is  not  the  founder  of  a  religion,  for  he  shows 
the  long  mistake  of  all  religions;  shows  that  the  spiritual 
relations  of  man  cannot  be  expressed  in  terms  of  dogma 
and  ritual,  but  can  only  be  interpreted  by  the  ideas  of 
sonship  and  brotherhood.  He  is  not  the  founder  of  a 
religion  because  he  is  the  proclaimer  of  a  Gospel  which  is 
addressed  to  men  simply  as  men  and  therefore  to  all 
mankind.  It  unites  men  on  the  basis  of  their  common 
manhood,  while  religion  divides  them  into  separate  groups 
on  the  basis  of  creed  and  cultus.  For  religion  is  nothing 
if  not  exclusive.  The  local  or  tribal  worship  was  at  once  a 
bond  of  union  for  its  votaries  and  a  barrier  of  separation 
from  worshippers  of  any  other  god;  and  in  every  age 
the  same  religious  narrowness  has  sought  to  monopolise 
God  and  make  Him  the  God  of  a  clique  as  it  once  made 
Him  the  God  of  a  clan.  When  the  Gospel  declares  that 
all  men  are  children  of  God,  and  their  common  relation  to 
the  Father  of  all  is  the  bond  of  human  brotherhood,  that 
is  in  effect  to  make  an  end  of  religion,  for  it  sets  aside  all 
that  is  distinctive  and  exclusive  in  rite  and  doctrine  and 
calls  men  of  all  religions  into  the  family  and  household  of 
God. 

And  there  was  a  "Gospel  before  Christ,"  it  has  been 
said.  Something  of  it,  a  shadow  cast  before,  appears 
eight  centuries  earlier  among  his  people.  We  follow  in  the 
Old  Testament  not  only  the  history  of  a  religion,  but  of  a 
struggle  between  the  intuitions  of  spiritual  truth  and  the 
selfishness  and  slavish  fears  of  the  religious  instinct.  And 
the  Old  Testament  closes  in  gloom  with  the  triumph  of 
the  mighty  religious  instincts  of  man's  lower  nature. 
The  voice  of  the  spirit  is  silenced  and  the  speakers  hunted 
down  and  slain.  We  see  no  prophet  any  more  and  soon 
we  see  Pharisees.  Jesus  came  to  continue  and  complete 


Catholicism  425 

the  suspended  revelation,  to  carry  on  the  hopeless  struggle. 
Much  more  than  a  prophet  he  is,  but  he  is  that.  He 
comes  the  successor  of  that  long  line  of  fearless  preachers 
of  a  spiritual  righteousness,  and  shares  their  martyrdom. 
He  too  encounters  the  hostility  of  priestly  zealots  and 
falls  a  victim  to  the  brute  force  which  is  the  last  argument 
of  bigotry.  And  until  the  present  day  of  milder,  though 
still  effectual  methods,  there  has  scarcely  been  a  Christian 
age  when  one  who  should  come  preaching  the  Gospel 
with  the  same  uncompromising  fearlessness  would  not 
have  met  a  similar  fate  at  the  hands  of  the  same  kind  of 
men — however  they  might  call  themselves  disciples  of  the 
Crucified. 


V 
Conclusion 

THE  impartial  student  will  find  himself  compelled  to 
recognise  that  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  and  the  Christian 
religion  are  two  quite  distinct  and  different  things.     The 
distinction  appears  in  the  New  Testament  itself.1    And 
amidst  its  varying  religious  teachings  there  begins  in  the 

1  "It  is  the  distinction  between  religion  as  experienced  by  one  who  was 
spiritually  in  touch  with  divine  realities  and  in  communion  with  God  and 
the  accretions  which  become  attached  to  his  message  and  his  story;  between 
the  Teacher  in  his  aloneness  and  simple  greatness  and  the  portraits  of  him 
drawn  by  his  own  and  succeeding  generations;  between  a  God-allied  life 
illustrating  a  divine  message  and  human  conceptions  and  opinions  of  both 
determined  by  varying  interests,  tendencies,  prepossessions  and  points  of 
view;  between  the  intuitions  of  an  inspired  Master  who  in  his  purity  of 
heart  beholds  God  and  the  speculations  of  lesser  men  who  grope  if  haply 
they  may  find  Him;  between  the  clear-sighted  vision  which  sees  what  is 
real  in  man  and  God  and  the  turbid  reasoning  which  grasps  at  phantoms; 
between  the  straight  way  to  God  through  loving  obedience  and  mechanical 
schemes  of  redemption.  .  .  .  The  spiritual  teacher  in  communion  with 
God  and  in  fellowship  with  man,  how  near  he  is  to  us,  how  apprehensible  to 
thought,  how  inspiring  as  an  example!  But  the  Messiah  on  the  clouds,  the 
Second  Adam,  the  great  High  Priest,  the  Eternal  Logos,  what  remoteness, 
what  spiritual  sterility,  these  terms  convey!  The  real  Jesus  who  goes 
before  us  in  the  life  of  a  son  of  God  inspires  our  reverence  and  devotion; 
but  the  apocalyptic  and  metaphysical  Christs  stir  in  us  no  sentiment  of 
love,  no  fervor  of  discipleship.  Had  only  these  latter  been  given  there 
would  have  been  no  disciples,  no  martyrs,  and  no  Christian  Church.  Did 
the  New  Testament  portray  only  these  Christs,  and  not  also  the  living 
Jesus,  it  were  a  dead  book."  Cone,  The  Gospel  and  Its  Earliest  Inter- 
pretations, 376-379. 

426 


Catholicism  427 

New  Testament  that  transformation  of  the  Gospel  which 
was  carried  out  to  the  extreme  on  other  lines  by  the 
Catholic  Church.1  The  preceding  pages  seem  to  lead 
to  the  conclusion  that  since  the  teachings  of  theology  and 
ecclesiasticism  which  have  ruled  the  thought  and  life  of 
the  Christian  world  are  in  relation  to  the  Gospel  of  alien 
origin  and  antagonistic  spirit,  the  whole  history  of  the 
Christian  religion  is  little  else  than  a  record  of  aberration 
from  the  primary  essential  truths  of  the  Gospel.  It  will 
be  objected  that  such  a  picture  of  that  history  is  out  of 
drawing  and  far  too  dark  in  color,  and  there  is  much  to 
sustain  the  objection.  That  Christianity  soon  came  to  be 
at  variance  with  the  Gospel  will  indeed  be  increasingly 
manifest  as  we  enter  more  fully  into  the  principles  of  Jesus 
and  their  spirit  takes  possession  of  us.  Yet  it  never 
wholly  lost  the  Gospel.  The  unthinking  faith  and  simple 
piety  which  has  led  multitudes  to  the  following  of  Jesus 
in  his  life  of  purity  and  goodness  has  been  through  all  the 
ages  the  salt  of  the  Christian  religion. 

A.mid  all  the  darkened  speculations,  the  barren  creeds,  the 
dreary  dogmas  which  denote  the  well-meant  infidelity  of  men 
to  the  teaching  and  the  spirit  of  Jesus,  there  is  discernible  a 
ray  of  inextinguishable  light  in  the  sentiment  of  loyalty  to  him 
as  our  acknowledged  Master.  It  is  a  strange  paradox  that 
among  those  who  have  most  radically  misconceived  Chris- 
tianity have  been  found  many  who  have  most  truly  lived  it.2 

For  life  is  illogical  and,  as  Madame  de  Stael  remarked  : 
"la  plupart  des  hommes  vrais  sont  inconsequent."  The 

1  "By  the  time  the  Church  had  been  fully  organised  the  whole  diameter 
of  thought  separated  Christianity  from  the  mind  of  Christ.  Everything 
that  he  valued  most,  with  the  exception  of  such  sentiments  and  rules  of  life 
as  devotion  to  his  person  had  forced  upon  the  conscience  of  Christendom, 
had  either  been  ignored  or  proscribed.  Everything  that  he  hated  most  had 
been  accepted,  systematise^!  and  authoritatively  taught."  The  Creed  of 
Christ,  171. 

a  Cone,  op.  cit.,  392. 


428  Conclusion 

Christianity  of  history  is  a  complex  of  many  different 
forces  and  tendencies,  because  all  human  thought  and 
action  issue  from  human  nature,  and  human  nature  is 
complex  and  comprehensive  of  conflicting  elements. 
Christianity  is  an  amalgam;  something  of  pure  gold — 
something  of  Jesus  himself — has  always  existed  amidst 
over  much  alloy  of  base  metal,  and  Jesus'  own  religion,  so 
far  as  it  has  been  practically  realised,  has  been  Chris- 
tianity's vitality  and  power.  The  Christian  religion  has 
been  shaped  and  moulded  by  the  power  of  the  Zeitgeist, 
by  the  diverse  influences  of  successive  ages.  Its  history 
shows  us  an  endeavor  to  realise  the  Gospel  ideal,  but 
checked  and  baffled  by  the  intrusion  of  ideas,  sentiments 
and  practices  of  ancient  religion.  We  can  scarcely  main- 
tain that  the  course  of  that  history  was  so  exceptionally 
guided  by  divine  Providence  that  every  doctrine  or 
practise  that  prevailed  was  therefore  for  the  best.  The 
maxim  "whatever  is  is  right"  is  the  one  Candide  found  so 
strikingly  at  variance  with  his  own  experience,  and  one 
which,  as  Dickens  remarks,  entails  the  consequence  that 
nothing  that  ever  was,  was  wrong.  When  after  Con- 
st antine  the  Church's  struggle  for  existence  ceases  and  it 
comes  to  terms  with  the  world,  one  hesitates  to  say  whether 
that  pagan  world  has  become  converted  to  Christianity 
or  Christianity  to  paganism.1  Yet  it  is  idle  to  inveigh 
against  the  necessity  or  the  contingency  that  dominate  in 
human  history  and  force  disastrous  compromises.  After 
all,  the  treasure  committed  to  earthen  vessels  was  in  large 
part  preserved.  Though  a  heavy  incubus  of  distortion 
and  perversion  has  long  lain  upon  the  Gospel,  that  has 

1  "Que  dirons  nous  de  l'e"glise  catholique  apres  Constantine?  N'est  il 
pas  vrai  que  dans  la  transformation  religieuse  qui  s'operait  alors  il  y  a  eu 
double  et  re"ciproque  conversion,  et  qu'il  est  difficile  de  dire  si  le  monde 
paien  a  6t6  plus  modifi6  par  le  Christianisme,  ou  le  Christianisme  plus 
profonde'ment  pe'ne'tre'  et  envahi  par  les  moeurs  et  la  religion  qu'il  croyait 
remplacer?  "  A.  Sabatier,  Esquisse  d'  Une  Philosophic  de  la  Religion,  209. 


Conclusion  429 

never  succeeded  in  stifling  it;  always  it  has  lived  on 
and  found  its  way  to  the  hearts  and  minds  of  men. 
"Throughout  the  centuries  we  see  the  recurring  effort 
to  get  back  to  the  living  teacher,  to  reach  through  specu- 
lations about  Jesus  to  Jesus  himself,  and  wherever  this 
effort  has  shown  itself  the  Life  has  still  been  the  light  of 
men."1 

While  the  contrast  is  plain  enough  between  the  Gospel 
and  the  religion  that  embodies  it,  yet  the  higher  our  point 
of  view  and  the  wider  our  outlook,  the  clearer  it  becomes 
that  through  all  its  strangely  chequered  history  Chris- 
tianity has  been  slowly  working  toward  the  realisation  of 
its  inner  truth.  If  men  have  been  dull  and  slow  of  heart 
to  apprehend  the  Gospel  revelation,  if  they  have  followed 
blind  guides  and  fallen  into  the  ditch,  if  the  Christian 
Church  had  to  be  of  her  time  and  could  not  but  share  in 
the  superstition  of  dark  days — still  under  all  misconcep- 
tion and  materialisation  the  slow  process  of  a  spiritual 
evolution  has  gone  on  unceasingly.  When  we  remember 
that  in  the  life  of  man,  as  in  the  thought  of  God,  a  thou- 
sand years  are  as  one  day,  we  can  see  that  in  these  stumb- 
ling steps  and  twilight  gropings  and  many  a  wandering 
from  the  way,  there  yet  has  been  a  constant  progress — a 
progress  that  may  be  figured  by  a  spiral  winding  round  a 
cone  which  at  every  revolution  seems  to  return  upon  itself 
but  in  the  end  will  reach  the  top.  The  Kingdom  of  God 
cometh  not  with  observation:  every  vital  force  of  the 
divine  order  works  noiselessly,  gaining  its  end  by  quiet 
persistence  and  a  gentle  insinuation.  Such  was  the  power 
that  quickened  the  hearts  of  the  first  believers  with  a  new 
life,  and  though  the  early  beauty  of  its  efflorescence  was 
but  for  a  season,  that  power  has  never  ceased  to  work 
upon  the  world.  Patiently  it  has  adapted  itself  to  un- 
favorable environment  and  made  the  best  of  hard  condi- 

1  The  Religion  of  Christ  in  the  Twentieth  Century,  131. 


43°  Conclusion 

tions  if  it  might  lead  the  better  any  human  movement  or 
minister  more  helpfully  to  any  human  need.  As  Rothe 
has  said,  ' '  Christianity  is  the  most  mutable  of  all  things, 
and  this  is  its  special  glory."  Now  we  find  it  working 
through  priesthood  and  papacy,  as  the  best  the  time 
allowed,  and  again  in  spite  of  them :  and  whether  working 
by  such  instruments  or  against  such  obstacles,  always  a 
spiritual  power,  distinct  from  dogmas,  churches,  creeds, 
and  codes.  Religious  systems  have  their  day,  and  the 
Gospel  enters  in  and  dwells  there;  but  as  in  a  tabernacle, 
not  a  fixed  abiding  place.  The  system  is  for  an  age;  the 
Gospel  too  is  for  that  age,  but  also  for  all  time.  It  has 
been  the  life  of  one  system  after  another;  it  cannot  be 
made  into  a  system  itself.  Under  every  form  of  mechan- 
ism it  is  felt  to  be  a  living  power,  a  spirit  of  light  and  life 
in  the  breast  of  humanity,  endlessly  diffusive,  fostering 
the  germ  of  every  better  growth  and  keeping  alive  in 
errors  and  evils  some  soul  of  goodness  and  truth. 

And  as  we  trace  this  power  in  the  past,  we  may  trust  to 
it  the  future.  "L'avenir,  c'est  le  present  bien  vu, "  and  to 
one  who  can  discern  the  signs  of  this  time  the  aspect  of 
the  coming  years  is  bright  with  promise.  We  have  heard 
much  complaint  in  the  religious  press  and  elsewhere  of  a 
growing  defection  from  the  churches  on  the  part  of  the 
more  intelligent  and  active  minded,  and  there  follow 
groans  over  the  materialism  of  the  age,  its  loss  of  faith  and 
lack  of  religious  feeling.  But  religious  people  are  apt  to 
see  through  a  glass  darkly  and  take  a  very  narrow  view. 
It  is  plain  to  a  deeper  insight  that  interest  in  the  vital 
questions  of  religion  was  never  stronger  or  wider  spread 
than  it  is  today.  It  is  not  from  any  atrophy  of  the  re- 
ligious sense  that  it  fails  to  respond  to  the  appeal  of  the 
churches,  it  is  because  that  appeal  speaks  a  dead  language. 
If  the  Christian  Church  only  reiterates  the  thought  of  the 
past  in  the  terms  of  the  past  and  has  no  clear  message  for 


Conclusion  431 

the  living  present,  we  cannot  wonder  at  the  loss  of  her 
attractive  power.  To  regain  it  she  must  preach  such  a 
gospel  that  men  whose  problems,  struggles,  and  tempta- 
tions are  those  of  this  day  shall  feel  it  to  be  a  thing  for 
them — shall  find  in  it  not  merely  a  reminiscent  applica- 
tion to  the  Nicene  or  the  Reformation  age,  but  answers 
to  questions  of  the  hour  and  guidance  for  life  in  this 
modern  world.  And  for  this  she  has  only  to  preach  the 
real  Gospel  of  Jesus. 

In  his  teaching  of  righteousness,  love,  purity,  and  unselfish- 
ness, and  in  his  example  of  obedience,  self-sacrifice,  and  help- 
fulness, are  contained  the  highest  motives  and  inspirations  of 
which  man  is  susceptible.  .  .  .  The  great  verities  of  the 
Gospel  have  an  inappreciable  worth  for  the  ends  of  spiritual 
culture.  They  establish  man's  faith  in  himself  and  in  the 
divine  order  of  the  world.  Trust  in  them  produces  hope  and 
courage.  They  enter  into  the  structure  of  all  true  character 
and  constitute  the  vital  principle  of  spiritual  development.1 

This  Gospel  nothing  can  antiquate;  it  is  the  same  yester- 
day, today,  and  forever,  and  it  is  the  one  need  of  the  present. 
We  are  living  in  a  world  of  wider  horizon  and  more  com- 
plex harmonies  than  was  known  to  our  fathers.  The 
religious  motives  that  inspired  them  are  outworn  and 
powerless ;  once  they  were  magnets,  but  us  they  fail  to 
magnetise.  The  religious  ideas  they  cherished  seem 
survivals  of  a  pre-historic  time,  and  we  know  instinctively 
that  the  truth  is  larger  than  the  dogma.  Flimsy  schemes 
of  salvation  spun  out  of  the  theological  cobwebs  of  the 
past  are  hanging  in  tatters,  and  theories  of  the  Bible  and 
the  Church  which  served  good  purpose  in  former  days 
have  been  relegated  with  other  antique  furniture  to  the 

1  Cone,  op.  cit.,  393  and  378.  What  the  Gospel  can  do  for  our  modern 
life  is  set  forth  very  fully  and  impressively  in  the  last  chapter  of  Prof. 
Schmidt's  The  Prophet  of  Nazareth,  entitled  "  The  Leadership  of  Jesus." 


432  Conclusion 

mental  lumber-room.  Now,  as  in  the  great  thirteenth 
century,  the  Spirit  of  Truth  is  calling  us  out  of  a  con- 
ventional religionism  into  the  wider  ways  of  the  world's 
life.  We  are  coming  to  see  with  the  prophet  that  God 
has  poured  out  His  Spirit  upon  all  flesh,  and  that  the 
eternal  Pentecost  is  the  coming  of  that  Spirit  in  the  primal 
constitution  of  humanity.  The  traditions  of  ecclesiasti- 
cism  make  men  reluctant  to  admit  of  a  spiritual  presence 
and  power  anywhere  outside  of  institutional  Christianity, 
and  it  is  their  conviction  that  the  only  moral  and  spiritual 
energies  that  work  upon  the  world  have  leaked  out  from 
the  Church,  like  thin  streams  through  the  cracks  of  a 
reservoir.  But  God's  omnipotence  is  not  the  servant  of 
any  ecclesiastical  methods,  nor  so  patient  a  force  as  to 
work  through  these  alone.  The  feeling  that  would  confine 
His  presence  to  the  sacred  seclusion  of  the  Church,  as  if 
it  were  profane  to  seek  Him  in  the  manifold  movement 
of  the  world,  is  a  survival  from  the  decadent  Judaism 
which  had  lost  the  inspiration  of  an  earlier  day.  There  is 
a  strange  kind  of  faith  that  looks  back  to  a  bygone  age  for 
the  God  it  cannot  find  in  its  own,  and  a  strange  kind  of 
piety  that  can  trust  Him  for  heaven  but  not  for  earth. 
The  dismal  chant  of  the  Monk  of  Cluny — made  into  a 
modern  hymn — tells  us  to  give  up  this  world  as  hopeless 
and  turn  our  gaze  to  the  celestial  world  where  all  is 
blessedness  and  joy;  yet  how  one  who  fails  to  discover 
God's  presence  in  this  world  which  he  hath  seen  can  be  so 
sure  of  Him  in  some  other  world  which  he  hath  not  seen  is 
a  little  difficult  to  understand.  Something  still  lingers  of 
the  old  idea  of  a  natural  enmity  between  the  Church  and 
the  world,  yet  the  only  real  contrast  and  conflict  is  be- 
tween good  and  evil,  not  between  sacred  and  secular. 

That  which  is  needed,  and  for  lack  of  which  Christianity 
languishes,  is  a  wider  outlook,  a  determination  to  look  the 


Conclusion  433 

world  in  the  face  without  misgiving  or  mistrust,  to  harmonise, 
to  foster,  and  to  inspire  the  various  spheres  and  interests  which 
the  Providence  of  God  opens  to  the  men  of  our  day.1 

Christianity  has  been  for  too  long  a  specialism  and  a  small 
affair:  the  affair  of  religious  people  whom  the  sect  spirit 
tends  to  form  into  a  sort  of  close  corporation,  and  who 
fail  to  see  that  we  lose  the  whole  Gospel  if  we  make  our 
communion  as  Christians  anything  different  from  our 
brotherhood  as  men;  the  affair  of  people  concerned  only 
with  the  separate  soul  and  the  future  life,  and  who  there- 
fore fall  behind  and  part  company  with  the  general  ad- 
vance of  civilisation  and  the  growth  of  human  culture, 
and  are  even  sometimes  opposed  to  these  as  merely  secular 
and  worldly.  Such  a  Christianity  strangles  the  Gospel. 
For  what  is  the  Gospel?  It  is  the  revelation  of  the 
Heavenly  Father  and  a  call  to  communion  with  Him 
through  a  heart  and  will  in  harmony  with  the  Good,  a 
call  to  the  love  of  God  and  of  men.  It  is  a  transforming 
power  which  pervades  all  feeling  and  actuates  all  conduct ; 
it  is  a  new  spirit  in  the  man  and  a  new  way  of  living.  Can 
that  have  any  other  embodiment  than  just  life  itself? 
Will  not  the  religion  embodied  in  something  narrower 
than  human  life  be  something  narrower  than  the  Gospel  of 
Jesus  ?  He  called  his  followers  the  light  of  the  world,  the 
salt  of  the  earth;  the  Kingdom  of  God  was  leaven  to 
penetrate  and  energise  the  whole  life  of  mankind.  Reli- 
gion seems  content  to  cultivate  its  garden,  without  laboring 
to  prepare  the  way  of  the  Lord  in  the  waste  places  of  the 
earth.  It  will  compass  sea  and  land  to  make  proselytes, 
but  it  is  to  bring  them  into  the  garden ;  there  is  no  effort 
to  make  the  wilderness  blossom  as  the  rose.2  There  are 

1  Fremantle,  The  Gospel  of  the  Secular  Life,  8. 

2  The  churches  send  missionaries  to  China,  but  in  the  days  of  the  sand 
lots  oratory  and  the  cry  to  exclude  the  Chinese,  whom  economic  forces  were 
bringing  in  multitudes  to  our  shores,  they  did  not  recognise  the  divine 

28 


434  Conclusion 

men  today  contriving  and  toiling  to  improve  existing 
conditions  in  every  walk  of  life.  If  we  ask  who  they  are, 
the  answer  will  not  always  be  that  they  are  Christians; 
but  they  are  none  the  less  co-workers  with  God  because 
their  work  is  what  some  call  secular  and  they  do  not  come 
to  Church  or  seem  to  care  about  religion.  They  care  at 
least  for  the  betterment  of  social  life,  for  the  bringing  into 
a  truer  order  the  confused  affairs  of  men;  and  for  this,  we 
may  be  sure,  God  too  cares  and  "worketh  hitherto. " 

The  Church  claims  to  be  a  divine  institution,  but  has 
not  been  willing  to  recognise  that  the  secular  institutions 
which  organise  the  development  of  secular  society  have 
also  a  divine  foundation  and  that  the  forces  working  for 
social  progress  are  leading  toward  a  divine  end.  If  we 
cannot  always  see  this  in  detail,  if  indeed  we  find  much  of 
evil  tendency  in  our  modern  life,  that  should  not  blind  us 
to  the  broad  truth.  Faith  in  God  should  teach  us  that  the 
errors  of  men  cannot  annul  the  force  of  heaven  moving  to 
noble  issues  in  mankind.  Nor  is  there  such  a  conflict  of 
faith  and  sight  as  some  have  supposed.  Past  centuries 
tell  the  story  of  accelerating  human  progress,  and  in  this 
age  of  ours — because  it  is  the  latest — can  be  seen  a  wider 
and  more  potent  dominance  of  spiritual  forces  than  the 
world  hitherto  has  known.  Too  long  they  have  been 
concentrated  in  exclusive  channels,  and  their  release  is  not 
a  loss  to  the  Church  but  a  gain  to  the  world.  Look  at  the 
associations  for  political  reform,  the  countless  organisa- 
tions of  philanthropic  effort,  the  discoveries  of  science  and 
their  application  to  mechanical  inventions,  the  cultivation 
of  art  and  the  employment  of  the  artistic  spirit  in  the 
humble  things  of  common  life,  and  you  will  find  in  these 

leadership  of  the  migration,  nor  rise  to  the  great  opportunity  it  brought  to 
their  doors,  nor  utter  a  word  of  protest  against  the  hard  selfishness  that 
blocked  the  way  of  the  immigrants  to  the  wider  life  and  higher  civilisation 
of  the  new  world. 


Conclusion  435 

and  other  such  secular  agencies  an  undreamed  of  power  for 
the  uplifting  of  mankind.  The  truth  is  that  in  human 
progress,  as  in  our  personal  being,  the  material  and  the 
spiritual  are  interwoven,  and  the  world,  like  Wordsworth's 
cloud,  "moves  altogether  if  it  moves  at  all."  Looking 
back  to  eighteenth-century  life,  as  it  is  painted  in  Tom 
Jones,  we  cannot  doubt  that  morals  and  religion  have 
travelled  by  the  railway  and  that  electricity,  turned  to 
so  many  uses,  has  had  a  spiritual  significance  and  wrought 
unforeseen  effects. 

The  wide  outlook  then  has  much  to  encourage  the 
optimist;  nevertheless  the  immediate  present  has  its 
dangers  and  difficulties  that  make  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  the 
one  need  of  the  world  today.  The  serious  menace  of 
social  unrest  is  calling  for  its  ministry  of  reconciliation. 
The  age-long  war  between  capital  and  labor — the  two 
that  should  be  yoke-fellows — is  waged  on  wider  scale. 
Out  of  their  pinched  and  narrow  life  the  sullen  hostility  of 
ill-paid  wage- workers  is  rising  against  the  rich,  carelessly 
indifferent  to  hard  conditions  they  do  not  trouble  to 
investigate.  Schemes  are  not  lacking  to  order  matters 
for  the  better,  and  vigorous  efforts  are  making  to  that 
end.  Yet  no  permanent  cure  can  be  effected  by  treating 
the  symptoms  of  disease.  If  we  are  true  to  the  method  of 
Jesus  we  shall  not  be  content  to  divide  the  inheritance 
between  two  selfish  brothers,  for  our  endeavor  must  be  to 
make  both  brothers  generous  and  just.  We  must  go  down 
to  something  deeper  than  all  class  division  and  social 
estrangement,  the  manhood  in  which  all  men  are  one,  the 
underlying  unity  which  makes  all  our  conventional  dis- 
tinctions pitiful  in  the  sight  of  God.  It  is  only  the  renewal 
of  a  right  spirit  in  the  hearts  of  men  that  can  make  real  the 
ideal  of  the  Revolution,  Liberty,  Equality,  Fraternity.  Let 
me  add  that  it  is  in  the  light  of  the  Gospel  we  learn  what 
liberty  really  is.  It  is  not  doing  as  we  please,  but  doing 


436  Conclusion 

the  right  of  our  own  volition.  We  see  everywhere  today 
a  conflict  between  self-will  and  external  authority,  and 
it  is  the  failure  to  harmonise  these  opposing  forces  that 
makes  democracy  a  perilous  experiment.  An  archbishop 
has  declared  that  he  would  rather  see  England  free  than 
England  sober;  the  Czar  for  his  part  would  have  Russia 
sober  rather  than  free.  Surely  it  is  desirable  that  men 
should  be  at  once  free  and  sober.  As  I  have  said,  the 
only  true  freedom  is  autonomy  and  we  shall  not  really 
have  a  self-governing  State  until  we  have  self-governing 
men  for  its  citizens;  we  shall  have  either  an  anarchy  of  self- 
will  or  a  despotism  of  compulsion. 

The  present  conditions  that  confront  them  carry  a  plain 
message  to  the  preachers  of  religion:  "Soyez  de  votre 
si£cle!"  They  who  are  for  standing  on  the  ancient  ways, 
forgetting  that  Time,  the  great  innovator,  never  stands  still, 
will  surely  be  left  standing  there  alone.  The  religion  that 
is  to  win  the  modern  mind  will  not  be  cast  in  the  mould  of 
any  past  epoch,  or  narrowed  to  the  notions  of  any  one  sect. 
The  faith  of  the  future  will  be  a  doctrine  not  merely 
certified  as  orthodox  by  due  authority,  but  one  which 
commends  itself  as  true  and  carries  with  it  its  own  authen- 
tication. Much  water  has  run  under  the  bridges  since 
upholders  of  traditional  doctrine  could  successfully  employ 
the  method  of  meeting  the  conclusions  of  science  or 
criticism  by  denouncing  four  fifths  of  modern  learning  as 
infidelity,  and  since  ecclesiastical  intolerance  could  safely 
silence  by  force  teachings  it  could  not  refute  by  argument. 
Mere  freedom  of  utterance,  however,  leaves  something 
to  be  desired.  Many  have  parted  with  an  early  "faith" 
that  seems  no  longer  reasonable,  and  yet  they  find  little 
to  attract  them  in  a  "reason"  that  offers  nothing  but 
negations,  and  they  are  halting  irresolute,  as  sheep  having 
no  shepherd.  I  would  say  to  them :  You  have  been  taught 
to  identify  the  religion  of  Jesus  with  a  theologico-ecclesias- 


Conclusion  437 

tical  caricature,  and  you  reject  the  one  with  the  other. 
What  is  needed  is  to  disengage  them.  Give  your  mind 
to  a  study  of  the  life  and  words  of  Jesus,  measure  past  or 
present  teachings  by  the  principles  he  revealed,  and  you 
will  no  longer  confound  his  Gospel  with  any  misrepresenta- 
tion of  it  that  has  ever  obtained  among  men.  The  words 
of  Lessing  are  pertinent  today:  "After  eighteen  centuries 
of  Christianity  it  is  high  time  to  go  back  to  Christ. " 

For  the  Christian  Church  has  scarcely  preached  the 
Gospel  to  the  nations.  It  has  been  less  concerned  with 
righteousness  and  the  Kingdom  of  God  than  with  theolo- 
gies and  a  Kingdom  to  come;  and  while  it  has  preached 
Paulinism,  Augustinism,  and  ecclesiolatry,  it  has  too  much 
ignored  the  teachings  of  the  life  which  is  the  light  of  men. 
And  I  may  remark  in  passing,  if  some  earnest  preachers 
drop  the  regulation  themes,  they  are  apt  to  turn  to 
psychotheraphy  or  Christian  Socialism,  which  aim  at 
improving  physical  health  or  securing  a  fairer  distribution 
of  this  world's  goods,  rather  than  to  the  Gospel  of  Jesus 
which  aims  at  awakening  the  spirit  of  man. 

One  Church  prides  itself  on  its  historic  continuity,  another 
on  its  consistent  adhesion  to  the  necessity  of  conversion, 
another  on  its  preservation  of  primitive  forms  of  ritual,  another 
on  the  intellectual  consistency  of  its  creed ;  but  amongst  all  the 
forms  of  Church  life  is  there  one  created  by  the  special  deter- 
mination so  to  bring  each  human  life  under  the  full  and  radiant 
power  of  the  personality  of  Jesus  that  this  has  become  its 
characteristic  note?1 

This  is  the  consummation  devoutly  to  be  wished.  What  I 
have  had  at  heart  in  this  little  book  is  to  bring  before  such 
readers  as  it  finds  the  immense  import  of  Jesus  and  his 
message  to  mankind.  Its  aim  is  wholly  positive,  and  if  it 

1  Contemporary  Review,  August,  1904.  "Humanity  Measured  by  Jesus 
Christ,"  D.  Macfayden. 


438  Conclusion 

seem  a  mere  attack  on  Christianity,  that  is  only  because 
the  first  necessity  is  to  clear  the  Gospel  from  the  doctrinal 
futilities  and  ecclesiastical  formalisms  which  have  gone 
far  to  paralyse  its  vitalising  action  upon  the  world.  This 
is  to  take  the  risk  that  some  will  only  see  in  these  pages 
support  for  the  teachings  of  negation,  and  negation  is  a 
desert  where  one  may  wander  forty  years  and  leave  his 
bones  in  the  arid  sands.  And  though  such  as  have  strength 
and  staying  power  may  cross  the  desert  and  reach  the 
promised  land  of  the  higher  positive,  no  one  would  wish  to 
lead  men  thither  who  have  not  the  qualities  that  will  make 
it  safe  for  them  to  undertake  the  journey.  But  time 
moves  fast  and  the  risk  is  not  now  what  it  would  have 
been  in  earlier  days.  While  some  deplore  a  decay  of 
ancient  faith,  and  others  hail  their  emancipation  from  its 
narrow  bonds,  the  deeper  spiritual  impulse  that  moves 
our  time  is  vital  and  constructive.  If  we  find  a  growing 
indifference  to  conventional  religionism  it  is  because  men 
are  stirred  with  a  sense  of  the  deep  realities  of  human  life. 
The  saying  of  Georges  Sand  seems  coming  true:  "The 
decay  of  the  old  creeds  restores  allegiance  to  the  true  God. " 
In  religious  circles  this  is  called  a  time  of  transition,  of 
change,  and  so  much  is  obvious,  but  the  important  thing 
is  to  know  the  character  of  the  change.  In  the  natural 
world  a  young  life  is  nurtured  within  some  hard  integument 
until  its  own  expansive  growth  shall  cast  off  the  husk  or 
shell.  This  is  the  change  our  time  is  ripe  for.  The  living 
truth  of  the  Gospel  is  breaking  from  its  strict  encasement 
in  the  forms  and  doctrines  of  the  past  and  beginning  to 
enter  as  an  inspiration  the  hearts  of  men. I  Long  overlaid 

1  "The  Gospel  has  been  in  the  past  the  vivifying  moral  principle  beneath 
dogmas  and  rites — like  those  subterranean  springs  which  supplying  the 
moisture  of  the  deeper  layers  of  the  soil  make  it  possible  for  strong  and 
deep-rooted  plants  to  sustain  life  in  spite  of  the  aridity  of  the  higher  layers; 
and  the  Gospel  remains  to  adapt  itself  to  the  new  conditions  and  the  new 
needs  of  our  day. "  J.  ReVille,  Liberal  Christianity,  108. 


Conclusion  439 

and  stifled  by  ecclesiasticism  and  theology,  it  has  lived  on 
to  become  the  unspoken  creed  of  these  later  years.  Like  a 
captive  bird  that  sees  its  cage  falling  in  ruins  where  it  has 
sighed  so  long  imprisoned,  and  feels  again  that  it  has  wings, 
the  revelation  in  Jesus  finds  the  hour  of  its  deliverance  at 
hand.  As  Renan  has  said,  "pour  se  renouveler  le  Chris- 
tianisme  n'a  qu'a  revenir  a  1'Evangile. "  And  if  our  re- 
ligion today  is  simpler,  more  rational,  and  more  humane 
than  that  of  past  days,  it  is  so  in  the  degree  in  which  it  is  a 
return  to  the  religion  of  Jesus.  "We  who  are  able  to  pass 
in  review  the  centuries  that  have  come  and  gone  since 
Christ  died,  can  see  that  things  are  working  for  the  emer- 
gence of  his  ideas  and  for  their  eventual  triumph.  "x  We 
can  see  how  the  Gospel  is  laying  its  grasp  upon  the 
younger  and  how  it  ennobles  all  upon  whom  it  lays  its 
grasp.  A  deep  instinctive  faith  in  its  revelation  of  divine 
fatherhood  and  human  brotherhood  is  the  ruling  idea  of 
our  day.  Instinctive  and  voiceless,  yet  it  underlies  and 
shapes  all  our  social  movements,  it  dominates  in  every 
sphere  of  thought  and  life. 

And  the  future  belongs  to  it.  What  the  Gospel  can 
do  for  the  healing  of  the  nations  cannot  be  read  in  Chris- 
tian history,  is  not  a  matter  of  experience,  but  is  yet  to  be 
ascertained.  Its  life  is  all  before  it.  It  has  a  future  of 
which  past  ages  scarcely  utter  a  prophecy,  but  some 
glimpse  of  it  is  offered  in  the  signs  of  this  time.  And  one 
of  these  is  this :  that  now  it  is  not  here  and  there  an  open 
mind  with  little  influence  upon  an  alien  world — a  Falkland 
or  a  Hales — that  gains  insight  of  the  deep  simplicities  of 
Jesus,  but  his  true  Gospel  is  coming  to  reach  the  world 
itself,  coming  to  be  known  by  the  mass  of  men  who  have 
any  power  of  thought  and  can  distinguish  the  real  from 
the  counterfeit, — can  be  turned  to  that  wisdom  of  the 
just  which  consists  in  seeing  things  exactly  as  they  are. 

1  The  Creed  of  Christ,  194. 


440  Conclusion 

To  change  modes  of  belief  which  had  been  long  estab- 
lished and  transmitted  from  generation  to  generation;  to 
free  the  general  mind  from  the  hold  of  inveterate  prejudice ; 
to  bring  about  a  silent  revolution  in  the  thought  and 
feeling  of  mankind  in  relation  to  the  profoundest  of  all 
objects  of  thought  and  feeling — this  was  the  mission  of 
the  Gospel  at  the  first.  It  was  by  the  force  of  its  appeal 
to  the  spiritual  nature  of  man  that  Christianity  made  its 
first  impression  upon  the  world,  first  established  itself 
among  the  things  that  are.  But  once  established,  it  drew 
to  itself,  an  overwhelming  concourse  of  minds  and  hearts 
unspiritual;  of  men  who  accepted  the  prevalent  religion 
because  it  made  for  their  advantage,  or  because  they  were 
of  those  who  run  with  the  crowd,  or  who  find  it  convenient 
and  desirable  to  have  a  religion  of  some  sort  and  are  not 
particular  of  what  sort  it  is.  And  so,  taking  into  itself 
the  false  ideas  of  older  religions,  the  gross  aims  and 
motives  of  the  world,  apostolic  Christianity  was  vulgarised 
and  vitiated,  became  earthly,  sensual,  and  not  a  little 
devilish.  To  change  again  these  false  and  worldly  ways 
of  thought  and  life,  now  prevalent  not  in  the  world  alone 
but  entrenched  within  the  Church,  infecting  and  debasing 
Christianity  itself,  could  not  be  the  work  of  a  single  age. 
The  so-called  Reformation  broke  off  some  fragments  of 
the  papal  empire,  but  it  was  a  battle  fought  in  the  fog  with 
indecisive  results.  The  old  theology  was  left  substantially 
unchanged;  Calvin  and  the  rest  rescored  the  theme  of 
Augustine  with  unimportant  variations  of  their  own.  The 
movement  was  a  revolt  rather  than  a  reconstruction,  and 
its  leaders  had  their  share  of  ignorance,  prejudice,  and 
passion.  No  one  dreamed  of  religious  tolerance,  still 
less  of  religious  freedom.  The  Synod  of  Dort  is  scarcely 
a  more  pleasing  spectacle  than  the  Council  of  Trent; 
the  Confessions  of  Augsburg  or  Westminster  went  as  wide 
of  the  Gospel  as  any  dogmas  of  the  Catholics,  and  assent 


Conclusion  441 

to  them  was  no  less  rigorously  enforced ;  and  as  for  eccle- 
siastical tyranny,  no  priesthood  in  its  most  insolent  day  of 
power  surpassed  the  Presbyterian  ministers  of  Scotland. 
Well  might  Friedrich  von  Logau  exclaim:  "The  Papists, 
the  Lutherans,  the  Calvinists  are  extant  and  flourishing; 
but  where  is  Christianity?"  Little  was  done  to  meet  the 
need  of  the  time,  for  no  less  was  needed  then  the  recon- 
struction of  the  whole  fabric  of  society,  changing  funda- 
mentally the  character — mental,  moral,  spiritual — of  men 
and  nations.  And  this  is  what  the  Gospel  has  been  about 
these  hundreds  of  years  while  at  times  it  seemed  to  be 
doing  nothing  and  almost  to  have  disappeared  from  the 
world.  The  nineteenth  century  saw  more  of  this  needed 
work  accomplished  than  any  other,  and  its  successor  is 
carrying  it  on.  Christianity  today  is  a  power  fresher  and 
more  vigorous  than  at  any  time  since  it  was  first  heard  of 
in  an  Empire  that  tried  in  vain  to  crush  it  or  to  cope  with 
it.  No  more  is  needed  to  confirm  a  wavering  faith  than 
to  see  how  Christianity,  returning  to  the  Gospel,  is 
divinely  gifted  with  the  power  of  being  ever  young.  The 
day  has  come,  not,  as  the  superficial  tell  us,  of  its  being 
numbered  with  the  things  that  were — for  this  is  only  true 
of  other  things  that  take  its  name  in  vain — but  the  day 
has  come  for  its  putting  forth  its  full  power  for  the  re- 
generation of  the  world.  And  as  we  learn  to  make  God's 
ends  for  us  the  conscious  aims  of  our  striving  we  shall 
hasten  the  coming  of  His  Kingdom  upon  earth,  no  longer 
in  the  form  of  any  separate  association,  but  rather  as  a 
new  soul  infused  into  all  those  organic  social  relations 
which  mould  and  educate  the  life  of  man;  a  Kingdom 
founded  in  the  security  of  domestic  affection,  the  stead- 
fastness of  friendship,  the  loyalty  of  business  life,  the  self- 
devotion  of  public  spirit,  the  righteousness  of  political 
rule,  the  peace  and  good- will  between  nations  which  is  to 
usher  in  the  federation  of  the  world. 


442  Conclusion 

These  last  words,  written  in  the  days  of  peace,  seem 
strangely  discordant  with  reality  in  this  time  of  furious 
warfare.1  Such  hopeful  anticipations  seem  overborne 
and  silenced  by  the  thunder  of  the  cannon,  the  crash  of 
falling  cities,  the  cries  of  agony  from  a  thousand  miles 
of  trenches.  Yet  through  the  darkness  of  this  night  of 
horror  we  will  not  lose  faith  in  the  dawning  of  a  better 
day.  What  we  see  is  God  arising  to  shake  terribly  the 
earth,  but  the  things  which  cannot  be  shaken  shall  remain. 
"Our  God  is  a  consuming  fire,"  and  what  He  is  burning 
up  is  the  sordid  selfishness  of  commercialism,  the  soft  love 
of  ease  and  pleasure,  the  feeble  laxity  of  civic  virtue,  the 
mean  forsaking  of  high  responsibilities.  And,  as  Carlyle 
has  it,  in  this  fire- whirl  wind  creation  and  destruction 
proceed  together.  The  war  is  calling  out  the  noblest 
qualities  of  our  nature:  the  heroism  of  self-devotion  unto 
death,  the  strong  resolve  and  patient  fortitude  of  a  people 
that  girds  its  loins  to  dare  and  do  and  suffer,  the  world- 
wide stirring  of  the  human  heart,  the  generous  sympathy, 
the  loving  service  given  to  the  unhappy  victims  of  the 
cruelty  of  war.  It  has  seemed  good  in  God's  sight,  we 
may  believe,  that  unbridled  greed  and  brutal  savagery, 
casting  to  the  winds  all  decency,  should  come  into  the 
open  and  frankly  show  themselves  at  their  extreme,  so 
that  the  conflict  with  what  is  most  evil  in  humanity  should 
be  brought  to  a  decisive  issue.  And  if  we  have  faith  in 
God  and  in  Man  we  cannot  think  that  issue  doubtful. 

And  that  faith  gains  vision  of  a  political  future  brighter 
than  the  world  has  known.  I  spoke  of  the  peace  that 
shall  bring  the  federation  of  the  world,  but  it  is  plain  now 
that  the  way  to  that  peace  is  through  war,  that  it  must  be 
fought  for  and  conquered.  For  political  society  has  been 
based  on  the  false  principle  of  competitive  national  in- 
terests. With  the  fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  fell  the  Pax 

1  November,  1915. 


Conclusion  443 

Romana  its  single  sovereignty  had  maintained.  As  the 
conflict  and  turmoil  of  the  barbarian  invasions  subsided, 
attempts  were  made  to  re-establish  the  Empire  of  the 
West,  but  they  proved  practically  unavailing  and  there 
gradually  grew  up  in  Europe  a  system  of  independent 
sovereign  States,  the  sovereignty  of  each  clashing  with 
that  of  its  neighbors,  and  the  history  of  Europe  has  been 
mainly  a  history  of  warfare.  Now  and  again  a  State 
gaining  ascendancy — Spain,  then  France — has  aspired  to 
the  domination  of  Europe,  and  now  Germany  seeks  the 
domination  of  the  world.  Yet  it  is  given  to  no  one  nation 
to  embody  the  life  of  all.  Their  mutual  limitations  declare 
the  "particularity"  of  the  nations.  "Man  is  parcelled 
out  in  men";  yet  Man  is  ever  one  in  nature  and  destiny. 
Every  people  is  a  member  of  humanity ;  it  does  not  live  to 
itself  alone,  but  in  this  membership  resides  its  being,  and 
its  true  greatness  lies  in  the  measure  of  its  consciousness  of 
organic  relation  to  the  organic  whole  and  of  its  ability  to 
grasp  and  realise  the  aims  of  universal  man.  National 
ambition,  blinded  by  selfishness,  makes  for  disintegration 
and  can  only  rouse  resentment  and  resistance.  It  is  the 
lesson  of  history  that  the  sovereignty  of  separate  States 
means  the  perpetuation  of  war,  and  this  world  war  is 
teaching  us  that  enduring  peace  is  only  possible  on  condi- 
tion of  the  surrender  of  absolute  sovereignty  on  the  part 
of  particular  States  to  a  federal  World-State, — just  as  the 
American  colonies  in  1787  surrendered  their  individual 
sovereignty  to  unite  in  a  federal  republic.  In  such  an 
international  State  the  central  authority  would  act 
directly  on  the  people,  as  our  Government  does;  it  would 
be  a  State  democratically  controlled,  as  ours  is,  and  war 
between  nations  would  be  as  impossible  as  between  two 
States  of  our  Union.  To  this  end,  we  may  hope,  the  God 
who  guides  the  course  of  history  is  leading  us,  and  for 
this,  though  unconsciously,  men  today  are  fighting.  To 


444  Conclusion 

this,  it  seems,  the  war  must  come — not  at  once  nor  without 
meeting  serious  difficulties,  such  as  beset  the  founders  of 
our  nation — or  else  to  the  World-Empire  of  a  people  who 
have  shown  themselves  recreant  to  all  that  is  highest  in 
humanity.  And  again  we  cannot  doubt  the  issue. 


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